BI infrastructure and AI-driven order automation for a German food and beverage producer
The producer needed business visibility and relief from time-consuming manual order intake. Incoming orders arrived as faxed and emailed PDFs, all keyed in by hand into the ERP.
The challenge
Operations ran on spreadsheets and manual order entry. Leadership had limited visibility into margin and throughput, and a member of the team spent most of every week typing fax and email PDF orders into the ERP. Errors crept in, and the work crowded out the customer conversations the same person should have been having.
Our approach
We delivered the BI foundation and a targeted order-intake automation in parallel, all natively in their existing Microsoft stack. Microsoft Fabric hosts the lakehouse and Power BI reports. AI Builder Form Processing was trained on their incoming PDF orders to extract structured fields. Power Automate orchestrates the flow into Microsoft Dynamics 365 Finance & Operations. Everything ships as native Microsoft components so the internal team owns and extends it without us.
What we delivered
- Microsoft Fabric lakehouse + Power BI dashboards for production, sales, and finance
- AI Builder Form Processing model trained on their incoming PDF orders
- Power Automate workflow piping extracted orders into Dynamics 365 F&O
- Team training and handover, all in the native Microsoft ecosystem
The outcome
A year after delivery the team still uses the system every day. Reporting that used to eat a day a week now takes minutes, around 95% of that time given straight back to the team, and order processing collapsed from seven minutes to thirty seconds per order. The freed-up capacity, around 0.75 FTE per week, has been redirected from manual entry into customer conversations. Leadership has the visibility they were missing across margins and operations.
“Conlatio thoroughly understood our challenges and built custom dashboards and automations that fit perfectly. The dashboards helped us optimise logistics costs. The automations save hours every week. A year later, the team still reaps the benefits every day.”
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