You hired customer service people to serve customers. Then you handed them a PDF, a keyboard, and a second screen to retype orders into. Or… worse… they have to take those orders over the phone… or fax… or smoke signal.
This is not a job. It is a photocopier with a pulse.
The number nobody adds up
Research from Conexiom and APQC puts customer service reps at 20-40% of their time on manual order handling, with a 1-3% error rate. Conexiom's worked example: a team handling 1,500 orders a month spends about $225,000 a year in labor. By our arithmetic, that is roughly $12.50 per order. Bizowie puts a distributor processing 15,000 orders at $200,000 to $350,000 a year.
Both companies sell automation. Their ranges agree with each other, which is the most you can ask from people who claim to sell the fix. Treat the numbers as directional.
However, we’ve seen the same trend across the industry for ourselves.
What's breaking
Orders arrive as PDFs, emails, faxes, spreadsheets, and phone calls. A person reads each one and types it into the ERP.
Now the error rate. 1-3% sounds small. If it applies per order, a team handling 1,500 orders a month sends 15 to 45 wrong orders. Each one becomes a return, a credit, or an apology.
The typing is not the problem
The typing is where the problem shows up.
The problem is the handoff. The buyer knows what they want. The ERP needs to know what they want. In between, a human translates. Every translation costs minutes and risks a mistake. You are paying a skilled person to be a very slow cable when their expertise could be harnessed in other places more effectively.
The usual fix is to ask customers to change. Use our portal. Learn our system. Your customers have ordered from a PDF catalog for years. Asking them to stop is a project, and most of them will decline to join it.
How it's actually solved
Capture the order where it starts, in structure, in the form the buyer already uses. Then nothing downstream needs retyping.
That takes a few routes working together. Self-service ordering for buyers who want it. CSV bulk ordering for large repeat orders. And the catalog your customers already hold.
The PDF problem
Most distributors assume the PDF is the obstacle. Rebuild the catalog, re-enter every product, and then maybe the PDF works.
It doesn't need to be that way. RocketX scans the PDF catalogs a distributor already has. Nothing needs to be built. Nobody re-creates the catalog.
The buyer taps a product, chooses a quantity, and it is in the cart. When the order is placed, it goes straight to the ERP. No data entry. No paperwork. No retyping.
The reps who used to translate orders go back to the accounts that need a person.
One honest caveat
An order only lands cleanly in the ERP if the product data behind it is clean. RocketX does not touch, clean, or reorganize a client's ERP data. Bad data at the source drags down everything that reads from it, including us.
What we do instead is watch it. An alert system checks the ERP data for inconsistencies: missing prices, missing product photos, products hidden because an EAN or description is missing. When it finds one, it alerts the people using the app, not just an administrator. The person who spots the problem can flag it to the person who owns that data. Issues can be sorted by revenue priority, so the gaps costing you the most sales get fixed first.
The repair still happens in your ERP, and it helps every system connected to it, not just ours. We find the problem. You fix it at the source.
The point
If a person retypes it, you pay for it twice. Once in labor and once in errors.
Let your sales team channel their skills more efficiently. Stop paying for unnecessary ordering errors. Let the buyer order from the catalog they already have.