90% of orders processed automatically – a purchasing system for a plant importer

The potted-plant importer works with eighteen regular suppliers from the Netherlands, Germany, Denmark and Italy, handling around 3,500 line items a month. Each supplier sends orders and price lists in its own way – as Excel spreadsheets, PDF files, via a messaging app or through its own B2B portal.

The two-person purchasing team spent more than 240 hours a month transferring data and calculating costs. Invoices arrived several weeks late, so the profitability of each supplier relationship could only be assessed after the fact.

Naming posed a further difficulty. The same species appear under Latin and trade names, often spelled in several variants, and onboarding a new supplier required around two weeks of preparation for the team.

Together with the purchasing team, we analysed 250 historical orders. This produced a dictionary of 600 plant species covering every name in use, along with a description of each supplier's trading terms.

The resulting system receives orders and invoices from all channels, recognises individual line items and transfers them into the company's systems. Items that raise any doubt are automatically routed to an employee for review. The purchasing team also received a dashboard showing costs and margins by supplier.

We divided the rollout into three stages – from suppliers with the simplest documents to those with the most complex formats. At each stage, every line item was reviewed during the first week, and thereafter only those flagged by the system.

Purchasing staff now concentrate on work they previously had no time for: sourcing new suppliers, negotiating terms and monitoring delivery quality. Within a year, the number of suppliers grew from 18 to 27 without any increase in headcount.

The commercial director sees the margin on every supplier in real time, together with a forecast for the coming week, enabling purchasing decisions to be made in advance. In the spring 2026 season, revenue grew by 28% year over year with an unchanged back-office team.

The system also revealed that the same species had been purchased from two suppliers under different names, at prices differing by 18%. The savings from this single finding covered 40% of the project cost.