Email stops being the bottleneck

The challenge

Everything came in through the same inbox: orders, customer questions, supplier offers. Emails got lost, the same thread was answered twice, and orders were typed by hand into the management sheet.

How it was done before

One person triaged the mail every morning and forwarded it by hand to whoever it concerned; orders were copied field by field; threads without a reply dropped out of sight.

What we built

• A classifier labels every incoming email by type and routes it to the right person.
• Order data is extracted from order emails and entered into the management system.
• Threads with no reply after 48 hours generate an automatic follow-up.
• A dashboard shows what is pending, whose it is and since when.

Human oversight

Emails the classifier cannot identify with confidence go to a human review queue; orders above a threshold amount are confirmed by hand before entry.

What the client takes away

• Email classification and routing
• Automatic order entry
• Thread follow-up and pending-items dashboard

Outcome (expected)

The specific metrics — hours recovered, errors avoided, response times — are agreed at the start of each project and measured afterwards. This scenario is illustrative: we do not publish figures we cannot back up.

Limits

• Complaints and strategic suppliers always go to a person.
• The classifier improves with use: the team's corrections fine-tune it.
• It does not replace the order manager: it prepares their work.