Order intake to dispatch, on one thread
Sales, plant scheduling and the customer are usually looking at three different versions of the same order. Getting them onto one is most of the work.
A packaging business rarely loses margin at the machine. It loses it in the gap between the order landing, the plant hearing about it, and the customer being told what is actually happening.
What we bring, and what it changes
Order intake, production planning and customer systems often run apart from one another, leaving teams reconciling spreadsheets instead of responding to demand.
Filed under Industry & productionFour places an order slows down
Intake
Emailed purchase orders and PDFs retyped into the ERP, with the transcription error discovered later on the plant floor.
Scheduling
Planning run against a spreadsheet copy of the order book that is a day behind whatever sales agreed this morning.
Status
Customers calling for a delivery date nobody can answer without walking the floor and asking someone.
Invoicing
Dispatch and billing reconciled by hand at month end, which is exactly when a margin leak is least useful to discover.
The systems one order touches
None of these need replacing to be joined up. Most packaging engagements start by making the estate you already own behave as one system.
- CRM and quoting
- ERP and production planning
- EDI trading-partner feeds
- Inventory and raw materials
- Warehouse and dispatch
- Finance and invoicing
Rebuilding quote-to-cash without stopping the line
Map the order path
Every hand-off from enquiry to invoice, including the ones that happen by email.
Automate intake
Orders arriving as data — EDI, portal or parsed document — instead of as something to retype.
Join planning
One order book the plant and the sales team read from at the same moment.
Open it up
Status, pricing and documents exposed to customers so the phone stops being the interface.
One order book, visible to everyone who needs it
The measurable change is rarely a faster machine. It is that an order is entered once, that the plant is planning against what was actually sold, and that nobody spends their morning reconciling two systems that should never have disagreed.
Once the data is moving, the dashboards are almost incidental — production, inventory and sales in one place, daily, because the numbers now come from the same place the work does.
Where we have done this before
- View detailsConnected enterprisePackaging7 min read
One connected platform for a global manufacturing leader
A global leader in consumer packaging, industrial products, protective packaging and packaging supply chain services
ERP, CRM, EDI and e-commerce each ran a critical function, but information stopped at every boundary between them. We connected all four around the customer and the order, so customer, product, pricing, order and transaction data flow across the business.
- Customer 360 for sales and service teams
- One connected Lead-to-Quote-to-Order flow
- Automated EDI with trading partners
- View detailsAI agents & customer self-servicePackaging8 min read
One AI service agent for orders, invoices, pricing and support
A global leader in consumer packaging, industrial products, protective packaging and packaging supply chain services
B2B buyers had to call or email customer service for order status, invoice copies, pricing and stock. We built an Agentforce Service Agent for the customer’s website that verifies each buyer and answers from live Salesforce and ERP data — ten subagents in one conversation, with a human handoff when it is needed.
- Orders, tracking, invoices, pricing and stock answered in chat
- Live ERP data, not a cache
- Verified identity and handoffs with a visible wait time
- View detailsEDI operations & partner onboardingPackaging9 min read
Keeping orders moving through EDI exception management and partner onboarding
A packaging manufacturer supplying national foodservice, packaging, facility-supply and industrial distributors through EDI
EDI automation handled most orders, but custom products, below-minimum quantities, unmapped items and integration failures left purchase orders stuck in error queues. We traced each exception to its owner, worked it through with the customer and internal teams, and brought new trading partners live on Boomi.
- Stuck purchase orders worked through to fulfillment
- Exceptions resolved with customers, not bounced back
- New trading partner certified and live on 850/855/856/810
Other sectors
All 11 industries →Manufacturing
Plant-floor systems, ERP and supplier networks rarely speak the same language, so planners lose the signal between demand, capacity and materials.
Read moreIndustry & productionAutomotive
OEMs, suppliers and dealers run separate systems against a shared schedule, so a parts shortage or a warranty pattern becomes visible later than it should.
Read moreHealth & life sciencesPharmaceuticals
Validated systems, serialisation mandates and trial data all have to stand up to inspection, while the commercial side needs the same information moving at speed.
Read moreStart with your sector
Tell us which of these you operate in and where the systems are getting in the way. We will come back with the practices, the people and a realistic sequence.