Originally aired October 28, 2025 on Extropy On AIr.
Order entry is the front door to your revenue cycle, and for many companies it is still manual: emails, PDFs, faxes and spreadsheets. In the second episode of our Esker partner series, Kevin Zirkle of Extropy Advisors talks with Nick Carpenter of Esker about the real cost of order management chaos, what intelligent order management looks like, how AI fits in, and the results one manufacturer saw.
Listen: Extropy On AIr podcast page | Spotify
Key takeaways
- Manual order management hurts efficiency, quality, cycle time, employee retention and the customer experience.
- Intelligent order management takes orders however customers send them, validates them and makes exceptions easy to resolve.
- EDI, e-commerce and RPA all have a place, but none of them easily covers every customer and every business rule.
- Esker’s AI is built in from day one, from reading free-text emails to spotting unusual order volumes.
- One packaging manufacturer cut order handling time by 80% and freed up more than a quarter of its team’s capacity.
What does manual order management really cost?
Nick, who has focused on Esker’s order management applications for nearly a decade, sees the pain fall into five areas:
- Efficiency. Customer service teams still key orders into the ERP by hand and jump between disconnected systems. One of Nick’s customers called it the swivel chair.
- Quality. Order entry errors, like the wrong customer, price or quantity, lead directly to credits downstream. Complex master data and pricing agreements make them more likely.
- Cycle time. Approvals and back-and-forth with sales, production and customers slow down the time from receipt to entry, which matters when you have SLAs or want to be first to fill an order.
- Turnover. Newer generations of customer service reps want to be in front of customers, not behind a screen doing data entry.
- Customer experience. Late, incomplete or incorrect orders, and customers left in the dark on order status, erode trust, and trust drives growth.
Kevin has seen the same thing with clients. Teams think the order process is fine until the data shows backlogs, corrections and delayed shipments, the silent killers of the order-to-cash cycle.
What does intelligent order management look like?
Nick grounds the buzzword in a few practical steps:
- Consolidated order intake from every channel, including email, EDI and mobile apps for field teams, and for global companies, routing each order to the right ERP and legal entity.
- Validation against your business rules, master data and sources of truth, like CPQ, quotes and contracts.
- Frictionless exception handling. Not every order will flow through untouched. When a customer sends the wrong price, you need a smooth way to communicate and get confirmation or a revised PO.
- Order creation in your ERP and in your CRM, like Salesforce, so everyone has a complete customer view.
- Changes and returns after the order is placed.
Esker’s order management is part of a broader B2B customer service suite that also covers inquiries and claims management. Esker focuses on industries like industrial manufacturing, medical devices, distribution, packaging and electronics.
How is Esker different from EDI, e-commerce and RPA?
Nick notes that B2B order management is often overlooked, to the point that Gartner doesn’t publish a Magic Quadrant for it. The two common alternatives each have limits. Every company he works with has EDI and e-commerce initiatives, but it is hard to move 100% of customers onto those channels, and too much friction can send them elsewhere. Esker lets you take orders the way customers already send them.
RPA is great for structured, repeatable work, but order management is complex. It may work for ten customers, but it is hard to scale across hundreds or thousands with different habits and business rules. Nick also sees Esker as one of the few platforms that spans the office of the CFO from credit to cash, including the often overlooked quote-to-order step. For companies with older, heavily customized ERPs, Kevin adds, that kind of orchestration beats a disruptive rip and replace.
How does AI work in Esker order management?
Nick says many IT leaders are under pressure from their boards to find real AI use cases, so he focuses on specifics. Esker positions itself as an LLM-as-a-service company, with AI capabilities built in through Azure Cognitive Services and kept current by Esker, so customers don’t have to maintain models themselves. Examples include:
- Natural language processing to read free-text emails like “What’s the status of my order?” or “Reorder what I bought last time” and act on them.
- Machine learning that remembers how each customer orders and maps their descriptions to your material numbers, which also helps with messy master data.
- Sentiment analysis to flag customers who may be at risk of leaving.
- Retrieval augmented generation to match generic descriptions to the right part number.
- Anomaly detection that compares each order with a customer’s long-term average, so teams can ask why volume dropped or prepare production for a spike.
All of these are turned on from day one. Kevin compares it to adding a seasoned customer service assistant who never gets sick or goes on vacation. Nick is clear that the goal isn’t replacing people. It takes tedious work off their plate so their jobs become higher value.
What results can companies expect?
Nick shared the story of a packaging manufacturer that was entering about 80% of its orders by hand, across both make-to-stock and engineered-to-order products. After implementing Esker:
- Order handling time dropped by 80%, from roughly 10 to 15 minutes to under two
- Order cycle time for engineered products fell by just under a third
- Just over 25% of the team’s capacity was reallocated to following up on open quotes
- Customer satisfaction rose, measured by an increase in net promoter score
Why does implementation take more than turning on the software?
Nick describes successful implementation as a three-legged stool: technology, people and change management. He sees Extropy as critical because the team helps companies avoid automating a bad process, align on clean master data and build a change management plan. That includes how to roll out to users, how to communicate, how to address fears about job loss and how to upskill the team for higher value work. Kevin agrees: it isn’t just launching technology, it is launching a new way of working.
Why should CFOs care about order automation?
For the companies Nick works with, order management is one of the main touch points with customers. Faster order intake means faster invoicing and a shorter DSO cycle. Lower cost to serve means companies can grow without adding headcount at the same pace. And empowered people deliver better customer experiences, which keeps customers ordering more. He shared an equation he heard from one leader: employee experience plus a focus on customer experience equals revenue impact.
In their words
Are they swivel chairing or are they wowing customers?
Nick Carpenter, Esker
Everyone’s always like, am I going to lose my job? We’re not seeing that. We’re seeing their job change.
Nick Carpenter, Esker
About the speakers
Kevin Zirkle is Director of Business Development at Extropy Advisors, where he works across Extropy’s partner ecosystem, matching organizations with the right technology and the right people to move transformation from the whiteboard into production.
Nick Carpenter is Head of Customer Services at Esker, where he has focused on order management for nearly ten years.
FAQ
What is intelligent order management?
Intelligent order management automates the B2B order process from intake to creation. It consolidates orders from every channel, like email, PDF, EDI and mobile apps, validates them against business rules and master data, makes exception handling smooth, creates the order in the ERP and CRM, and handles changes and returns afterward.
Why not just use EDI, e-commerce or RPA for order entry?
Most companies already have EDI, e-commerce and RPA initiatives, but it is hard to get every customer onto those channels, and too much friction can push customers away. RPA works for structured, repeatable tasks but struggles to scale across hundreds or thousands of customers with different ordering habits and business rules.
How does AI help with B2B order management?
In Esker’s order management, AI reads free-text emails and acts on them, remembers how each customer orders and maps their descriptions to your part numbers, flags at-risk customers through sentiment analysis, and detects unusual order volumes compared with a customer’s long-term average.
Keep exploring
- More from our partner series on Extropy On AIr
- Next in the Esker series: Collect Smarter, Not Harder: Human-Centric AR Automation with Esker
- Previous in the Esker series: The Human Advantage: Introducing Esker + Extropy
- Related: Beyond the Demo: Esker All Access
- Why Extropy
Still keying orders by hand? Book a discovery call and let’s look at your order-to-cash process together.
