Email orders into an ERP with no API. How it works at Eticod

Two lanes: the email body and the attachment from Drive

The agent watches the order inbox and picks the order emails out of the rest of the correspondence. Each order then goes down two lanes. The first lane reads the email body: who is ordering, what, how much and by when. The second lane saves the attachment to Google Drive and runs OCR on it in Gemini. PDFs arrive in different layouts, so the extraction cannot rely on a single fixed template.

Both lanes end in the same Google Sheets spreadsheet. The sheet is a queue and a log at the same time: every row records the source the data was read from. Only from there does the order go to the ERP.

A separate rule covers the dispatch date. The deadline in the email does not always fall on a working day. The system works out the dispatch date (7 days before delivery) and the production date (2 days before dispatch) itself, and when one lands on a weekend it moves back to Friday. It is a small thing, but without it an order “for Saturday” lands in the ERP with a date on which nobody is working.

Field checks before anything reaches the system

The ERP entry is the last step, not the first. Before the automation makes it, it checks that every field is there: customer, line items, quantities, deadlines. If anything is missing, the order goes no further. It goes back to a person with a note saying which field could not be read, and a link to the source.

The ERP entry is the last step, not the first. Anything uncertain stops earlier.

That is the only situation in which someone on the team touches the process. They do not correct the entry in the ERP; they fill in the missing piece in the sheet. The rest happens without them.

An ERP with no API: the automation clicks what a person would click

Eticod's ERP exposes no API. There is no way to send it an order in a single request. Instead, a browser automation logs into the system and makes the entry in its interface, click by click, exactly the way an employee used to. The difference is that it does it the same way every time and leaves a trace of every operation in the log.

This required no change to the system and no new module. What it did require was collecting the access details and a technical account before launch, not along the way.

What this adds up to. Entering one order by hand took 20–25 minutes. Today it takes 0, and since launch not a single incorrect entry has reached the ERP. At Eticod that comes to around 160 hours a month, with 300–500 orders a month. We do not measure it with a stopwatch; we calculate it from the volume, and that is how we label the figure in the case study.

If your orders also arrive by email and someone retypes them, do the same sum: number of orders times the time for one entry. How much of that you can realistically recover is something we work out on a free call.

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