How it works: the journey of one order through a company
An email arrives with an order attached as a PDF. Here's what happens to it today – and what changes once an AI agent takes over. One concrete case, no theory.
What happens to an order today
A model case drawn from process audits at Easytrade clients: a sales and service company whose orders arrive by email. The times are typical, not extreme.
The order lands in the shared inbox.
- waiting
1 h 38 min The administrator opens and reads it. Until then she was busy with other emails.
She retypes 14 items into the ERP. One code doesn't match the price list, so she looks it up.
She finds that only 80 of the 120 pcs of item 7 are in stock. She writes to the customer.
- waiting
overnight
15 h 20 min The customer replies: send 80 pcs, the rest later.
- waiting
1 h 15 min The administrator creates the order in the ERP and sends the confirmation.
The same order. With an agent.
On Wednesday morning nobody is retyping anything. This is how the order moved through the company with an agent – from the incoming email to the line in the report. Scroll through the steps and the scene follows you.
-
Reads
The agent spots a new email in the orders inbox. It opens the attached PDF and reads it the way a person would – even if it's a scan.
new message · order_0917.pdf · 2 pages -
Extracts the items
From two pages of text it builds a structured list: 14 lines with code, quantity and price. It adds the delivery address and the requested date.
14 items · address · due by 12 Sep -
Checks against the ERP
It verifies every code, price and stock level directly in your ERP. 13 items match. For item 7 the customer wants 120 pcs; only 80 are in stock.
13 OK · 1 exception (item 7) -
Hands the exception to a person
The agent doesn't guess. It sends the administrator one question in Teams with a ready-made proposal: ship 80 pcs now and 40 pcs within 5 days? She confirms with one click.
question sent 14:54 · 15:06 approved by K. Nováková (sales) -
Confirms the order
It creates the order in the ERP and sends the customer a confirmation with both delivery dates. In your company's tone of voice.
order 2026-0917 created · confirmation sent -
Logs and reports
The whole run is kept in the log – what it read, what it found, who decided. The weekly report gains one line: 15 minutes, 1 of them human.
log saved · report updated
What changed with this one order
It isn't about reading speed. It's about the order not waiting until someone has time.
solid bar = stays with peoplehatched bar = taken over by the agent
- The order is confirmed on the day it arrives – at 17:00 or on a Saturday.
- Every item is checked against the ERP, not spot-checked.
- People deal only with exceptions – and get them with a proposed solution.
- You know exactly what happened, who decided and why.
The times are illustrative. In a pilot we measure them on your real orders.
- Emailread · send
- Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace
- ERP / warehouseread · write
- checks items, creates orders
- CRMread · write
- adds customer history, records tasks
- Documents and price listsread only
- PDFs, scans, DMS – the basis for its decisions
- Teams / Slackquestions
- asks people when it isn't sure
- Log and reportwrite
- records every step and decision
You don't need a new system
The agent connects to what you already use – via an API, an export or a database view. For orders that's usually four things: the inbox, the ERP, the price list and a channel for asking people. Nothing gets migrated, nothing gets replaced.
- Read access is enough to start – write access to your systems comes after the pilot.
- If a system has no API, the Easytrade team adds one as a small piece of custom software.
- The same pattern – read, extract, verify, decide, record – works for invoices, complaints, enquiries and service requests too.
The agent's autonomy grows in steps you sign off: first it only proposes, then it acts with approval, and finally on its own within agreed limits.
Which request waits the longest at your company?
In a free consultation we walk through one of your real orders, invoices or enquiries and show which steps an agent would take over and where a person stays in the loop. No strings attached.
Free consultation