AI Sales Order Agent for Unleashed Inventory Management System

The Message That Prompted This Post

A supplier of cable ties and cable management products in South East England, UK, sent us this through our website contact form:

"We use Unleashed Software and input 100s of orders and quotes manually per day from email. We want an agent to input the data directly onto Unleashed / reply back to emails with confirmations / availability / quotes etc."— A supplier of cable ties and cable management products in South East England, UK

Its buyers are trade customers in the UK and across Europe, such as electrical contractors, cable management distributors, facilities management companies and industrial wholesalers. The inbound email holds two kinds of request that need different records in Unleashed and different replies, which is what this post is about.

Why Orders and Quotes Are Different Records in Unleashed

Unleashed Software has separate modules for sales orders and sales quotes. A sales order is a committed transaction: it reserves stock, feeds the fulfilment workflow, and converts to an invoice. A sales quote records what was offered and at what price, doesn't reserve stock, and can be converted to a sales order if the buyer accepts.

Entering quote requests as sales orders reserves stock nobody has committed to and inflates the open orders report. Entering everything as quotes delays real orders. So each email has to be sorted before any record is created.

Telling an Order From a Quote Request

Signs of a firm order

• A purchase order number ("purchase order 45821", "Our order reference:", or a purchase order attached)
• Instructions to supply: "Please supply", "Please dispatch", "We require"
• A delivery address and a requested delivery date

Signs of a quote request

• Questions about price or stock: "Can you quote", "What is your best price for", "Please advise availability", "Do you have in stock"
• No purchase order number and no delivery address
• Conditional wording: "subject to your price being competitive", "if you can supply"

An email that could be either waits for a person rather than being guessed. A quote request entered as an order creates stock and fulfilment problems that are tedious to undo.

How Buyer Product References Are Matched to the Unleashed Catalog

Trade buyers of cable ties rarely use the supplier's product codes. They describe what they want: '200mm x 4.8mm black nylon, 1000 pack', 'those heavy-duty stainless steel ones we ordered in March', or '300mm UV-stabilised, natural, qty 5000'. Logistify matches each line using your Unleashed product list and that customer's past orders, so descriptions a buyer has used before resolve to the same products.

A line it can't match with confidence, such as a description it hasn't seen or one that fits several products, is held for a person with the reason before anything is created in Unleashed.

How a Sales Order Is Created in Unleashed

For a firm order, Logistify creates the sales order in Unleashed through its API, with the customer, each line's Unleashed product code and quantity, and the price. The price is the buyer's when the order states one; otherwise it's the customer's price tier in Unleashed. A price that doesn't add up is held for review. The order then follows your normal Unleashed workflow: picking, dispatch and invoicing.

How a Sales Quote Is Created in Unleashed

Unleashed's public API treats sales quotes as read-only, so they can't be posted the way orders are. Logistify prepares each quote, with the customer, the matched products, quantities and prices, as an Unleashed import file, and the sales quote is created in Unleashed from that file. When the buyer accepts, the quote is converted to a sales order through the normal Unleashed workflow.

How the Reply to the Buyer Works

Once the order or quote is in Unleashed, Logistify replies to the buyer's email.

• Order confirmation: confirms the order and the lines entered, with the quantity available for each line.
• Quote: each requested product with its price and the quantity available.
• Part available: gives the quantity available now and a date for the rest, and asks whether to ship what's available now with the balance to follow.

What Hundreds of Emails a Day Looks Like

At 100 to 200 emails a day, the volume alone is hard on a small order desk, and the mix of orders and quotes adds judgment to every email: which record to create, which products the buyer means, and what to reply. With Logistify, clean orders and quote requests are entered and answered without anyone retyping them. People handle only the specific question on the emails that are held.

What Logistify Doesn't Do

• It doesn't choose a warehouse by where the buyer is. Replies give the quantity available for each line, not stock by warehouse.
• It doesn't read faxed orders.