Distribution

AI for Distribution

The distance between your ERP, your warehouse, and your collections team.

INDUSTRYSenior Care LivingAI Agent LayerCloses coordination gaps across your operationsRecordsERP, EHR anddata sourcesSchedulingShifts, tasks andworkflowsBillingFinance, AR andrevenue cycles
01. Why AI Matters

Why AI Matters Here

Distribution companies operate on thin margins and high transaction volume. The coordination work between your customers, your ERP, and your suppliers moves through email, manual data entry, and phone calls. That is where time and margin disappear, and it is not a gap your ERP was designed to close.

Customer expectations for same-day quotes, real-time order status, and proactive back-order communication keep rising while headcount stays flat. Companies that have deployed AI in order-to-cash and procurement workflows are processing significantly more volume with the same team, not by replacing staff, but by removing the manual coordination work from their daily workload.

02. Operational Challenges

Where Staff Time Goes

Order Entry from Email and Documents

Your inside sales team re-keys orders from customer emails, PDFs, and spreadsheets into the ERP for several hours each day. Every manual entry carries the risk of a pricing error or a fulfillment delay that reaches the warehouse before anyone catches it.

Back-Order Communication

When a line item goes on back order, a customer service rep must identify it, contact the customer, confirm a substitute or revised ship date, and update the record. At volume across a large customer base, this consumes most of a team's available bandwidth.

Quote Response Time

Customers send multi-line RFQs and expect a response within hours. When your reps pull customer-specific pricing, check live inventory, and build quotes manually, turnaround slows and orders go to whoever responds first.

AR Collections

Your collections team works an aging report manually, reaching a fraction of open accounts each day. Accounts in the 31-to-60-day overdue bracket often wait a week or more for a first contact, which compounds days sales outstanding across the portfolio.

03. Qualification

Who This Is For

Good FitNot a Good Fit
You run an ERP and process more than 50 orders per dayYou are mid-implementation of a new ERP or WMS
Your inside sales team spends significant time re-keying orders from email or PDFYour product and pricing data are inconsistent or not yet centralized
You have defined customer pricing tiers, contracts, and product catalogsYou expect full automation with no human review of order exceptions
You want to pilot one process before committing to a broader deploymentYou have no defined process in place and want AI to create one from scratch
04. AI Applications

Where AI Agents Work

Inside Sales

  • Order entry agent: reads incoming orders from email, PDF, and EDI, validates SKUs and pricing against your ERP, and creates the sales order automatically. Your rep reviews exceptions only.
  • Quote generation agent: pulls customer-specific pricing and checks live inventory to return a complete multi-line quote in minutes rather than hours.

Customer Service

  • Back-order notification agent: detects back-order events as they occur in your ERP, drafts customer communications with substitute options or revised ship dates, and logs all activity.
  • Order status agent: responds to inbound customer inquiries by pulling live data from your ERP and WMS without a rep touch.

Accounts Receivable

  • Collections agent: works your aging report daily, sends tiered outreach based on days overdue and customer segment, and escalates accounts that do not respond to the coordinator.
  • Invoice matching agent: matches vendor invoices to purchase orders and routes discrepancies to the correct approver. Clean matches post automatically.
05. Results

What Changes With AI

Order Entry

Before: An inside sales rep spends 45 to 60 minutes re-keying a 50-line customer order from email into the ERP. Pricing and availability errors reach the warehouse on roughly 1 in 8 orders processed this way.

After: An AI agent reads the incoming order, validates SKUs and pricing against the ERP, and creates the sales order in under 3 minutes. The rep handles exceptions only, processing significantly more orders in the same shift.

AR Collections

Before: A collections coordinator manually works an aging report of 300-plus open accounts, reaching roughly 40 per day. Accounts in the 31-to-60-day bracket often wait more than a week for a first contact.

After: An AI agent contacts every open account on a defined schedule, sends tiered communications based on days overdue, and escalates non-responders. DSO reduces by 12 to 18 days on average.

Figures shown are representative of outcomes in comparable implementations.

06. Agent Screens

What the agents look like

Representative screens showing how AI agents surface data and present decisions to your staff. Click any card to see the full view.

Finance

AR Collections Agent

Aging accounts worked daily, tiered outreach sent automatically, and non-responders escalated to your coordinator.

Operations

Order Entry Agent

Incoming orders read from email and PDF, validated against your ERP, and posted without manual re-keying.

Customer Service

Voice AI Order Status

Inbound order status calls handled by a voice agent pulling live data from your ERP and WMS.

07. Engagement

How an Engagement Begins

Phase 1: AI Foundation Training (1 to 3 weeks)

Your operations and inside sales teams attend structured AI training before any solution is proposed. Participants identify their own highest-priority use cases, which builds internal demand before any project begins.

Phase 2: AI Readiness Assessment (2 to 3 weeks)

Tayana evaluates your ERP environment, order workflows, and data quality. You receive a prioritized list of pilot-ready processes with integration requirements and expected outcomes for each.

Phase 3: Pilot Deployment (6 to 8 weeks)

One process is automated in your live ERP environment using real transaction data. Investment starts from $10,000. Order entry automation, back-order management, and AR collections are the most common starting points.

08. Questions

Common Questions

Can AI automate order entry from customer emails without replacing my ERP?

Yes. An AI agent reads incoming orders from email, PDF, or EDI, validates them against your ERP's pricing and catalog rules, and creates the sales order automatically. Your ERP remains unchanged. The agent connects via standard API.

How long does a distribution AI pilot take to deploy?

A single-process pilot runs 6 to 8 weeks from kickoff to production. That covers integration with your ERP, testing against live transaction data, and staff training. You are not committing to a multi-year engagement.

What does an AI back-order notification agent do exactly?

It monitors your ERP for back-order events as they occur, drafts a customer-specific notification with substitute options or a revised ship date, and logs all activity automatically. Your customer service team handles escalations only.

Will an AI collections agent work with data already in my ERP?

Yes. The agent pulls aging data directly from your ERP or accounting system and applies your existing customer tiers and communication rules. No data migration is required before you can start a pilot.

How much does an AI pilot cost for a distribution company?

Pilot engagements at Tayana start from $10,000, depending on the process and integration complexity. This covers design, build, testing, and deployment in your live environment with real data.

Does AI for distributors work with Acumatica, NetSuite, or Microsoft Dynamics?

Yes. AI agents connect to your ERP via standard API and are not dependent on a specific platform. Tayana has deployed agents against Acumatica, NetSuite, and Microsoft Dynamics environments specifically.

What happens when an AI agent makes an error on an order?

Every agent includes human-in-the-loop review for exceptions. Orders that fall outside your defined rules are flagged for your team rather than auto-posted to the ERP. You set the exception thresholds before go-live.

How is AI different from the automation already built into my ERP?

Built-in ERP automation handles structured, rules-based processes within the system. AI agents handle unstructured inputs such as email text and PDF documents, and coordinate across systems your ERP does not natively connect to. They extend what your ERP does without modifying it.

Ready to Take the Next Step

Book a thirty-minute call. We will confirm whether your situation is a fit and what the right starting point is, whether that is the AI Adoption Accelerator, a readiness assessment, or a direct pilot.

Book a Call
Agent screen