How Saint-Gobain cut order processing time by 75-80% with Sales Order Automation

Saint-Gobain’s customer service team was keying every customer purchase order into QAD by hand. Orders arrived by email, often three or four pages long with specification sheets attached, and customers ordered using their own part numbers.

Before automation, fast-track orders waited three to four days before anyone could enter them. Orders that needed contract review took hours of extra manual work. Work queued on individual desks, so nobody could see where an order sat or where the backlog was building.

Saint-Gobain needed a way to get orders into QAD as they arrived, catch errors before an order booked, and give the team time back for work that needs their judgement.

The challenge: complex orders, keyed by hand

Saint-Gobain’s order entry depended on people retyping documents into QAD, and the orders were rarely simple. Every day an order waited for entry was a day before scheduling, picking and shipping could start.

The impact was clear:

• Fast-track orders waited three to four days for entry
• Contract review orders needed hours of extra manual processing
• Multi-page POs with spec sheets were keyed line by line
• Customer part numbers had to be matched to Saint-Gobain items
• Account details, shipping addresses and payment terms were re-keyed from every PO
• Work queued on individual desks with no shared view of the backlog

The goal

Saint-Gobain wanted to take manual entry out of the order process without forcing its business into a standard workflow. The team’s objectives included:

• Get customer orders into QAD the day they arrive
• Stop re-keying POs line by line
• Validate prices, account details and terms against QAD before an order books
• Keep its own review stages for contract, item, price, quality, export and scheduling
• Give the team a shared view of every order in progress
• Roll the process out site by site

The results

With sales order automation, Saint-Gobain now gets orders into QAD as they arrive, and its team handles only the orders that need a decision.

Key results included:

• Fast-track orders reach QAD the same day, down from three to four days
• 75 to 80 percent less processing time on fast-track orders
• 40 percent less time to confirm contract review orders
• Account details, shipping addresses and payment terms validated against QAD before the order books
• Full visibility of where every order sits and where work is building
• First site live in about eight weeks, with four sites live today and 15+ rollouts planned over the next year.

“Our fast-track orders used to sit for three or four days before anyone could get to them. Now they’re in QAD the same day, and the team spends its time on the orders that actually need a person.”

–Joseph St. Clair, Director of ERP & Digital Manufacturing, Saint-Gobain

The impact

By automating order entry, Saint-Gobain removed the keying step that sat between a customer’s PO and everything that follows it.

DocLib reads each PO down to the line, identifies the customer from name, address and phone, and translates customer part numbers through the QAD cross-reference. It checks every price against QAD and catches duplicate orders. When everything matches, the sales order is created in QAD with nobody touching it. When something does not, the CSR sees the PO beside live QAD data and works only that exception, including accepting a quoted price with the quote number recorded against the order.

The workflow was built around Saint-Gobain’s process, not the other way round. Contract, item, price, quality and export review, scheduling and delivery dates based on available-to-promise all run inside it. When a customer sends a revised PO, DocLib holds the original and merges the two when the revision arrives. For Saint-Gobain, the result was not just faster entry. It was an order desk focused on the orders that need judgement, and a process they can take from one site to the next.

Want to see it with your own customer POs? Request a walkthrough.

Ready to take order entry off your team’s desk?

See how DocLib’s Sales Order Automation reads customer purchase orders, validates every line against QAD and creates the sales order, so your team handles only the exceptions. Already using DocLib for AP? Sales Order Automation runs on the same engine.