A sales desk that knows what a hundred metres of ceiling means
SIG Benelux distributes construction and technical insulation materials to contractors and installers from branches across the Netherlands and Belgium, with its distribution centre and technical insulation production in Waalwijk. It is part of SIG plc. Like every builders' merchant, it is a business built on knowing the customer: the sales desk knows what a contractor means when they ask for a hundred metres of ceiling, even when the order does not say so.
That knowledge is exactly what made the process hard to automate.
An order at SIG is rarely a clean order line. Around 3% carry an article number. Roughly 47% have only a description. The rest arrives as a WhatsApp message, a photo pasted into an email, or a sentence that only makes sense if you know the customer.
Thousands of those came in every month, and all of them were retyped. The customer's email sat on the left of the screen, Dynamics 365 on the right, and someone at the desk read one and typed the other. A single order took five to seven minutes. A composite order took up to fifteen.
Time was only part of the cost. Nobody called a customer back with a question, because asking made the order take longer. Product knowledge lived in the heads of the people at the desk and was written down nowhere, so a new colleague took months to become useful.
"You deliberately leave questions unasked, because asking makes the processing take longer. You would want to ask, but there is no time. That is being made possible now."— Patrick Wijers, Sales Desk Manager, SIG Benelux
One mailbox, one process, four weeks
SPAIK ran the project as a four-week Kickstart and built the automation on Lleverage, with Dynamics 365 staying in place as the system of record.
The scope was deliberately narrow: one location, one process, the central order mailbox. Not the phone, not WhatsApp, not the local mailboxes. Better one order type finished than three halfway.
The first two weeks went into the shop floor: four in-depth interviews with the sales desk, a strategy session with the management team, and reading along in the real order mailbox. No assumptions about how the process worked, just watching how it actually ran. The second two weeks were building and shadow running. The automation processed order emails alongside the team, so everyone could see where it failed without any customer noticing.
"Those first emails were the moment. You saw it recognise the customer, pick out the delivery date, the contact person and even a number of articles. That is when you know you can take this further."— Patrick Wijers, Sales Desk Manager, SIG Benelux
Photo from sigbenelux.comThe back office automation SIG runs on now
The workflow runs on Lleverage and is integrated with Dynamics 365. It reads order emails, PDFs, spreadsheets and pasted photos. It sorts every mail into one of five buckets, so the desk sees the needed action at once. It matches order lines to articles, using the order history rather than a rulebook. It creates the draft order in Dynamics 365. And it flags low-confidence lines for review instead of guessing.
The biggest question up front was the data, not the technology: our data is not clean enough for this. The answer turned out to be sitting in the ERP already. Years of order history contain the translations the sales desk made by hand: this description, from this customer, means that article. Nobody has to write the rules down, because the history is the rulebook. A new colleague inherits the desk's product knowledge instead of rebuilding it.
"I knew the technology made this possible. My biggest question was the quality of our data. It was a positive surprise to see the order history was enough of a base to get results this fast."— Ditte Smit, Marketing Director, SIG Benelux
The automation sits next to Dynamics 365 rather than inside it. Customising the ERP would have cost more and left less room to change your mind. Dynamics stays the administrative base. The flow reads the order, works out what it means and prepares it. The salesperson opens a draft that is ready to review, and is still the one who approves it.
The project moved Lleverage's own integrations forward at the same time. A native Dynamics 365 Finance and Operations connection, with sales order, customer, item and invoice nodes, was built by Lleverage engineers during the same months, so the next Dynamics customer starts from a finished integration. Along the way, SPAIK's questions about connecting SIG's Azure-hosted database, access for the SIG team and alerts when a workflow fails were handled by Lleverage engineers as they came up.