From data entry to quoting: when the order desk moves up

A medical order desk already used to automation.

AVF Biomedical sells medical equipment to hospitals and clinics. Four people on the order desk, reporting to Delphine Mollé. Ten field sales reps.

The company is part of the Finmed group, alongside its sister company Frafito. And at AVF, automation is not a new subject. Even before Catalog, two order flows out of three were already handled through EDI.

50 to 60% of orders already entered the ERP directly, with no human involvement.

That still left the few hundred monthly orders arriving by email. The last channel with no automation.

"We genuinely wanted to automate the data entry and let the team focus on work where they add real value."

— Delphine Mollé, Customer Service Manager

Several hundred email orders, five minutes each, every month.

Five minutes per order. Open the email, identify the customer, read the lines, find the references in Sage, type them in, check. Every month.

The team was not doing its job badly, and Delphine says so plainly: entry errors were already rare. The problem was not reliability. It was time. Time that could not be compressed, swallowed by a mechanical task, and that kept the team from doing anything else.

When Frafito, the group's sister company, adopted Catalog to absorb a spike in orders from a new contract, and it worked, doing the same at AVF became obvious.

"It worked at their end. So we copied it at ours. To save time."

No grand speeches. No steering committee. Proof of value inside the group, and a pragmatic decision.

Two days to test, four to roll out.

Delphine formed her own view of the Order Capture agent in two days. Ten, twenty orders. She watched how it read the emails, proposed the references, pre-filled the lines in Sage.

Then she opened access to the whole team.

"It is dead simple, really. There is no training to do."

Today, 100% of eligible orders go through Catalog. Not 80%. Not "most of them". All of them. Adoption is total, not because it was imposed, but because the tool became the shortest path between the customer's email and the validated order in the ERP.

The measured gain: from 5 minutes to 2 or 3 per order. Around 50% of the handling time absorbed by the Order Capture agent.

Across several hundred monthly orders, that is more than 15 hours freed every month for a team of four.

What really changes: the order desk takes on the quotes.

This is where AVF's story gets more interesting. Because the time saved did not stay as spare time. It was reinvested.

Before Catalog, the order desk wrote quotes occasionally. When a rep was in a meeting and a customer could not wait, they stepped in. It was the exception.

Today they handle every quote in their territory.

"We used to pass them to the reps, now we run them ourselves."

Each assistant has assigned geographic territories, and each handles every customer quote request across hers.

The field reps, for their part, are freed from the admin. Fewer quotes to write between two meetings. More time on the road, where they create value.

Delphine describes the change as a natural drift: the assistants already wrote some quotes, they simply write more. But behind that apparent simplicity, the structure of the sales team has shifted.

"It was about freeing the reps from the administrative side."

People were able to move to higher-value work. Not because they were asked to "upskill" through a twelve-step training plan. Because what stopped them doing what they already knew how to do was taken away.

The inbox, the logical next step.

AVF had automated two channels out of three through EDI. Order Capture covered the third. The next question follows naturally: what about the emails that are not orders?

"If it could go straight into the mailbox and pull out the orders, that would be better still."

That is exactly why our Inbox Organizer agent exists. Sort, qualify, extract.

The trajectory is easy to read. Order desks move from data entry to quoting. If email sorting is absorbed too, the cursor moves again. Less administration. More selling.