Automate Order Intake From Email

Every shop knows the drill: a new RFQ lands in the inbox, someone opens the attachment, reads the specs, types the details into a spreadsheet or quoting tool, and hopes nothing gets missed. Multiply that by dozens of emails a day and the time adds up fast — not to mention the typos, missing quantities, or wrong material callouts that slip through.

Why Email Intake Still Drags You Down

Email is the default channel for most customers, and it isn’t going away. But relying on manual handoffs creates three problems that hit digital manufacturers hard:

• Speed. Each manual touch adds minutes or hours before quoting even starts.
• Accuracy. Copy-paste errors on quantities, tolerances, or material grades turn into scrap or rework later.
• Visibility. When data lives in someone’s inbox or a local spreadsheet, the rest of the team can’t see it until it’s re-entered somewhere else.

For shops running CNC, sheet metal, or 3D printing services, those delays directly extend lead times and erode margins.

What Automated Intake Actually Looks Like

Automation doesn’t mean replacing your sales team — it means removing the robotic work so they can focus on the parts that need judgment. A modern intake flow typically does three things:

1. Capture. Emails (and attachments) are ingested automatically from a shared inbox or forwarded address.
2. Extract. Key fields — part numbers, quantities, materials, processes, due dates — are parsed from the message body and attached STEP, STL, or DXF files.
3. Validate and route. The extracted data is checked against your process rules (e.g., minimum wall thickness for 3D printing, max envelope for your CNC machines) and pushed into the quoting engine or MES as a draft job.

The result: a clean, standardized job record appears in your system minutes after the email arrives, ready for an estimator to review and send a quote.

Handling the Real-World Variety

Customers send everything from a fully defined STEP file with a BOM to a napkin sketch in a PDF. Good automation handles the spectrum:

• Structured data. If the email follows a known format (e.g., a portal export or a repeat customer’s template), field mapping is straightforward.
• Semi-structured. PDFs with tables or callouts can be read with OCR and layout detection.
• Unstructured. Free-text emails and messy attachments get flagged for human review instead of forcing bad data into the system.

The key is a triage step: clean jobs flow straight through; exceptions queue up for a quick human decision. That keeps the fast path fast without letting garbage propagate downstream.

Connecting Intake to Quoting and Production

Intake automation pays off most when it feeds directly into the tools you already use. Look for an approach that:

• Creates a draft quote in your quoting engine with geometry, material, and process pre-filled.
• Attaches the original files and email thread for traceability.
• Surfaces DFM warnings early (e.g., undercut features, thin walls) so the estimator can address them in the first quote.
• Passes the validated job into the MES work queue once the order is confirmed, eliminating a second data entry step.

This end-to-end flow — email to quote to shop floor — is exactly what Solvi is built to support, letting shops move from RFQ to production start without re-typing a single field.

Getting Started Without a Big Project

You don’t need a six-month IT rollout to see value. Start with the highest-volume, most repeatable intake path:

1. Identify the top 2-3 customers or channels that send the most RFQs.
2. Map their typical email structure and attachment types.
3. Configure parsing rules for those patterns first.
4. Run in parallel with manual entry for a week, compare results, then switch over.

Once the fast path is stable, expand to the long tail of less frequent senders. Most shops find that 80% of their volume follows predictable patterns they can automate in days, not months.

Measure What Matters

Track a few simple metrics to prove the impact:

• Time to first quote. Target: under 15 minutes for standard parts.
• Intake error rate. Track discrepancies caught downstream vs. at intake.
• Estimator time on data entry. Should drop toward zero for automated jobs.

When those numbers move, you’ve freed capacity for the complex, high-value quotes that actually need your expertise.

Conclusion

Email isn’t the bottleneck — manual re-entry is. Automating order intake turns a chaotic inbox into a structured pipeline that feeds quoting and production with clean data from the start. Shops that make the switch cut lead times, reduce scrap, and give estimators back the time to win more profitable work. Ready to see how it fits your workflow? Solvi helps digital manufacturers automate intake, quoting, and production in one connected platform.