"We have been able to save approx. 40+ hours a week on manual data entry and can now have staff focus on other/more critical tasks.” - Seth Rossi, FireKing
The Problem: Entering Customer's Emailed Orders Requires Costly Manual Work
FireKing Baking Company, a Massachusetts bakery, bakes and distributes bread from their 200,000 square foot facility to lots of other businesses in the food industry. As their homepage states, they have been “bringing the art of European-style baking to restaurants, caterers, and retailers across the nation since 1995.”
Most of those customers are willing to follow ordering processes that fit well with NetSuite’s best practices, allowing for swift and low-effort creation of sales orders.
One of FireKing’s largest grocery chain customers, though, was still sending their purchase orders via a series of 20+ emails every day, containing hundreds of lines across several locations. The information in these emails then had to be manually typed into NetSuite as sales orders by FireKing employees.
To make matters worse, afternoon emails were supposed to update the morning’s initial order lines and quantities, resulting in laborious manual reconciliation and eye-blearing double-checking. Of course, even with significant effort, mistakes still got through, resulting in expensive erroneous shipments and a damaged customer relationship.
Seth Rossi, Systems Coordinator at Fireking, remembers the pain vividly:
“As they ordered with us through email, we thought we had no choice other than manually entering their orders line by line daily. This was almost full-time job in itself and was extremely labor intensive for our sales staff. This also lead to issues with invoices due to potential manual entry errors. With this being such an important customer to us, we knew we could no longer continue with such an unreliable method to enter their orders.”
Additionally, since order entry took so long, it could become a bottleneck and delay fulfillment, which was particularly noticeable since bread is ordered fresh with the intention to use it promptly.
This manual entry wasted about 8 hours of employee time every day. That’s over 2000 hours a year, which is significant for a mid-size distributor like FireKing, especially considering that all this was only for a single customer!
The Solution
Initial Approach: Encourage this Customer to Adjust Their Ordering Process
When FireKing initially sought help from Dylan (their dedicated Anchor Group consultant), his first suggestion was to see if this grocery customer could be persuaded to change their ordering process. Could they just fit into the standard FireKing flow?
This was a conversation well worth having, but it turns out that this customer’s purchasing team would have felt overwhelmed by such a radical change.
We encounter this sort of problem often: important customers (or vendors or partners) don’t want to change their routine, making otherwise “perfect” systems messier and more awkward.
For systems-minded people, this clutter is annoying. But it’s often still worth dealing with for the sake of maintaining key business relationships. It’s a major competitive advantage to be able to say, “You don’t have to change; we’ll adapt to you.”
Most people hate process change to begin with, and businesses even more so. Have you ever tried to convince a vendor to send you an invoice or shipping confirmation in a different way? Most of the time, the answer is “We wouldn’t even know how to do that.”
So Dylan realized he would need to find some other method of reducing the manual workload of order entry for FireKing employees.
What Worked: Embracing the Mess
Instead of fantasizing about a perfect ordering process, Dylan asked a different question: "How can we set up NetSuite to handle the chaos?"
The answer we landed on was simple and elegant: use custom scripting to convert those customer emails into sales orders automatically.
Instead of fighting the daily flurry of emails, FireKing now enjoys a system that thrives on them.
The Technical Details: NetSuite Email Order Automation
The customer had to make two minor changes, which we confirmed early on were acceptable to them:
Change 1: Send the emails to a new system email address, which is linked to a NetSuite email plugin. Easy switch.
- Send the order lines in an Excel document instead of in the body of the email. We weren’t certain this approach would fly with the customer, but it turns out that they can conveniently export the orders into Excel directly from their ordering software. Just as we had hoped, this didn’t feel like a big change to the customer; in fact, it was probably even preferable for them. Great news, as the standardized file format kept our customization work simpler!
Change 2: When the emails arrive, our user event script kicks in.
- For security’s sake, it only accepts emails from approved customer email addresses.
- It ignores the subject and body of the email as well as the file name and only processes the file contents. This way, typos in the email are of no consequence, and we’ve also avoided requiring any particular naming conventions.
- It divides any large files into smaller ones to make sure the script doesn’t time out before finishing.
- It creates one or more new sales orders and/or updates lines and quantities on existing open sales orders. This isn’t only additive; it can also reduce quantities or delete lines.
- It assigns a customer and a ship-to location for each order.
- If the customer fails to include a FireKing SKU for an item line (which we discovered to be a common occurrence during testing), the script will attempt to match the item based on the item description.
- It assigns priority flagging for morning vs. afternoon deliveries so the customer can receive the most urgent orders first.
Upon completion, the script sends confirmation emails to both the customer and the FireKing sales team.
- They are also promptly notified if there are any errors (for instance, if no match was found for an item missing the SKU).
- At this point, FireKing’s existing SO review and approval process kicks in just as it normally does for all their orders. We’ve exited the exception tributary and entered the main river of their standard process flow.
The Result: FireKing Employees Saved from Data Entry Slog
“Anchor Group quickly came up with a solution for us and started working on discovery and development immediately after our first call. The solution they delivered has transformed the way we process these orders. What began as a process that could take up to 8 hours a day now is fully automated. We now receive orders and have them in NetSuite immediately. This has made the process efficient and something we no longer need to stress over daily. We can now trust that our system will have the correct information.” - Seth, FireKing
Even if there are exceptions in your business that the standard process can’t handle, that doesn’t mean they can’t still be automated. We’ve done this sort of thing for many of our clients – automatically grabbing transaction information from emails, SFTP servers, etc.
Project ROI: FireKing's Investment in Automation Quickly Paid For Itself
From conception to launch, this project took 35 hours of consulting and development work.
Once launched, it delivered immediate, positive ROI through labor savings, faster fulfillment, and virtually eliminated shipping errors.
“Our company has greatly appreciated how Anchor Group approaches their solutions by gaining a deep understanding of our processes and pain points to deliver something that not only works for us, but exceeds what we thought we could do with NetSuite. With the solution they have provided, we have been able to save approx. 40+ hours a week on manual data entry and can now have staff focus on other/more critical tasks.” - Seth Rossi, FireKing
Key Takeaways: Willingness to Adapt Creates Genuine Value
The FireKing solution isn’t theoretically pure. It is practical:
- It recognizes that customer accommodation is a competitive strategy.
- It handles missing information through intelligent matching to avoid costly back-and-forth clarification emails.
- It restricts submission sources for added security without burdening customers with any extra hoops to jump through.
- It respects employee time by having robots handle the vast majority of the grunt work.
A Successful Partnership
FireKing preserved a valuable customer relationship while simultaneously saving a bunch of time and hassle internally.
This project was a reminder not to waste energy trying to fix established, change-resistant third-party behavior when you can reasonably adapt your IT systems instead. Your ERP should conform to your reality, not textbook ideals.
Kudos to FireKing for prioritizing flexibility and actual ROI over "perfect" processes! We’re grateful for the chance to work with such a great company. And the feeling is mutual: here's what Seth had to say about working together.
“With any issue we are currently facing, they are always willing to help us troubleshoot or develop a solution. They are very thorough in understanding our requirements and ensure that they develop solutions that allow NetSuite to work for our daily processes instead of us changing our processes for NetSuite.
We are essentially in a ‘reimplementation’ of NetSuite after an initial implementation that was not successful. We feel that Anchor Group is the right partner to get us to where we need to be.” - Seth Rossi, FireKing
Let’s Transform Your NetSuite Challenges into Competitive Advantages
If you’re drowning in manual processes or fighting to align real-world operations with your system, you don’t have to settle for inefficiencies and frustration. FireKing didn’t, and now they’re saving well over 40 hours a week. Plus, they have strengthened a key customer relationship!
Real-world operations don’t always fit the mold.
Let’s talk about what’s slowing your team down—and how we can fix it through custom NetSuite solutions that respect your reality. Our team here at Anchor Group is ready to make NetSuite work for you. Reach out today, and let us help you turn your NetSuite pain points into lasting competitive advantages.
