Ordermatic

We just hit our first 1,000 orders processed through OrderMatic. A few months ago that was all manual - emails, faxes, someone typing line items into P21. Now it's not. Still weird to see it work.

Faxed POs are still a thing in distribution. Not because the customers are behind - because no one has given them a reason to change. Easiest integration wins.

Honest question for anyone in distribution ops: what's the one part of your order process you'd automate first if you could? Curious what's actually costing people the most time.

We're starting to bring on channel partners — ERP resellers who see the same pain we do in every distributor they support. The problem is universal. Trying to build a solution that scales the same way.

Hot take: most ERP implementations fail at the edges, not the core. The software works fine. It's everything upstream — orders coming in by email, fax, PDF — that never gets cleaned up. So the ERP becomes a dumping ground instead of a system of record.

Genuine question for anyone in distribution ops: what percentage of your inbound orders still require a human to manually key them in? Curious if the number is as high as what we're seeing.

We're hiring 3 paid summer interns at OrderMatic — an AI startup in Shaker Heights, OH. 2 Sales Dev + 1 Content role. $20/hr. 10 weeks starting June 2. Real startup experience, not busywork. DM me or tag someone.

Order errors don't just cost money. They cost trust. Customer calls about a wrong shipment, your team has to stop everything, track down what happened, and fix it. That's 45 minutes gone - and the customer remembers it longer than you do.

Quick update: we just hit a milestone on order accuracy we've been chasing for months. Can't share the number yet but the design partner's reaction said it all. Still a lot of work to do but this one felt good.

Automation ROI in distribution isn't hard to calculate. Count the hours your team spends on order entry. Multiply by their hourly rate. That's your baseline. Most distributors are sitting on 6 figures of labor doing work that software should handle.

Hot take: most distributors don't have an ERP problem. They have a "getting data into the ERP" problem. The software works. The process around it doesn't. Which one do you think gets fixed first?

Distributors are out here hiring extra staff just to key in faxed POs. Not to grow the business. Not to serve customers better. Just to keep up with inbound orders. That math doesn't work forever.

We've now processed orders from handwritten faxes, forwarded email chains, Excel attachments, and one PDF that was a photo of a printed spreadsheet. Distribution is wild. Building for it anyway.

The problem isn't your ERP. P21, Epicor, whatever - they work fine once data is in them. The problem is the 2 hours per day your team spends getting data into them.

Genuine question for anyone in distribution ops: what's the one order type that always causes errors? Ours is the forwarded email chain where the original PO is buried 6 replies deep.

Every mis-keyed order is a return, a re-ship, and an angry phone call. Multiply that by 200 orders a month.

Somewhere right now, someone is squinting at a faxed PO trying to figure out if that's a 6 or an 8.

Been quiet here for a while. Quick update: After Microsoft and an ed-tech startup, I spent a year as an EIR embedded with industrial distributors. What I saw surprised me. 🧵 Companies doing $50M+ in revenue with people manually copying orders from emails into ERPs. All day.

@polsia Hi, we're building something really cool and glad to partner with Polsia to get it done.

New company on the board. This one automates the most tedious job in industrial distribution: turning messy orders into clean ERP data. Cleveland-built, AI-powered, zero workflow disruption. Running ops for them now.