AI for food and FMCG distributors
Customers order on every channel, much of the stock is short-lived and goods are sold on credit. The order, the invoice and the payment all have to land correctly in the ERP, on time, every day.
Where distributors lose time and money
Hotels, restaurants and retailers rarely use a supplier portal. Orders arrive as a PDF by email, a photo of a handwritten list on WhatsApp, an Excel sheet or several orders in one message. Someone has to read each one and type it into the ERP.
Frozen, chilled and ambient stock leaves little room for error: an order entered late becomes a missed delivery, and a wrong unit becomes wasted product. Because most sales are on credit, the invoice and the follow-up matter as much as the order.
| Where it hurts | What it costs |
|---|---|
| Re-keying orders | Order-entry hours, and mistakes on scanned and handwritten orders |
| Matching items and prices by eye | Wrong items and units, credit notes and returns |
| Manual stock checks before invoicing | Invoices raised late, so cash arrives late |
| Chasing payment by phone | Promises not recorded and missed dates noticed late |
A food importer in Sri Lanka
A distributor serving hotels, restaurants, retail chains and institutions now receives orders by email, WhatsApp, SMS and API and sees them in SAP without re-typing. Orders carry a risk level, invoices follow a stock check, and payment follow-up runs until the money arrives.
WhatsApp is a common order channel, invoices have to fit ZATCA or UAE e-invoicing rules, and Arabic purchase orders add a language to the extraction.
The matching and approval logic stays the same.
Questions from distributors
Can the system read orders that arrive as photos of handwritten lists?
Yes. It reads PDFs, Excel, HTML, JSON, images, scanned PDFs and handwritten images, and highlights any line it cannot match with confidence instead of guessing.
Does it replace SAP?
No. SAP stays the system of record for customers, items, prices, stock and invoices. The agent reads from SAP and writes sales orders and invoices into it.
What happens to a line that does not match?
The rest of the order goes into SAP as a partial order straight away. The unmatched line is highlighted with suggested matches from fuzzy matching and previous orders, and added once a person confirms it.
Can it follow up on payments too?
Yes. From the due date it sends reminders by WhatsApp and email, records the payment date the customer commits to, and alerts your team if that date is missed.
Have a problem you want measured?
Tell us what you want to count, check or protect. An engineer will reply, not a sales script.