How It Works
AI in the foundation.Not bolted on.
ChannelFlex was built from a blank slate around what AI can do today: take inbound RFQs and POs, extract every line, match to your catalog, and produce accurate quotes and ERP-ready sales orders. AI is the foundation, not a feature retrofitted into 15-year-old software.
One workflow for quoting and order entry, that gets better as the models do. Your reps stay in control of what goes out.
Customer-facing output
Quoting & order entry workflow
Foundation
ChannelFlex AI
One workflow for quoting and order entry
Most distributors and manufacturers run quoting and order entry as two separate fire drills. ChannelFlex brings them into one, continuous workflow: RFQs and POs go in, quotes and ERP-ready sales orders come out, with no manual rekeying in between.
RFQ to quote in under a minute
Inbound RFQs get parsed, line items matched to your catalog, and turned into a structured quote ready for a rep to review and send. More on quoting for distributors.
PO to ERP-ready order with no rekeying
Inbound POs (and accepted quotes) get extracted, validated against your catalog, and routed for approval before they flow into the ERP as sales orders. More on automated order entry.
From RFQ or PO to ERP-ready order, in one continuous flow
Email comes in. ChannelFlex reads it, opens the attachments, pulls every line item, and matches each one to your catalog. A structured quote or sales order lands on your rep's screen, ready to review and send. When the customer says yes (or sends a PO), the same lines convert into an ERP-ready sales order with no rekeying.
Under the hood, AI agents do the reading, matching, and structuring so your team doesn't have to.
Email arrives
"Need pricing on 47 items, see attached PDF"
AI reads & extracts
Every line item, quantity, and spec pulled automatically
SKUs matched
Part numbers resolved against your catalog
Rep reviews
Structured quote or order ready to approve and send
Quote or sales order
Quote sent to the customer, or order pushed to your ERP
Anything ambiguous gets flagged for your team to review before it moves forward.
Reading line items, including from photos and scans
Inbound RFQs and POs show up as a mess. A forwarded chain with three attachments. A scanned PO with a coffee ring on it. A field rep's phone photo of a list scrawled on a delivery slip. The pipeline handles all of it.
Emails, PDFs, Excel files, and images run through the same flow. The model reads the email for context, opens each attachment, and pulls every line item: customer part number, quantity, description, substitution notes, ship-by date if it's in there. Vision-capable models handle bad scans and handwritten markup that older OCR tools quietly drop. Here's what that looks like on a 125-line PO.
Matching parts against your catalog
Extraction is only half the work. The harder half is figuring out what the customer actually ordered. Buyers use their own part numbers, abbreviated descriptions, and shorthand that only their buyer understands.
ChannelFlex matches every line against your catalog in layers: exact part numbers first, then customer crosswalks (so a buyer ordering “ACME-5567” for a decade gets matched to your real SKU automatically), then fuzzy match on descriptions and specs.
Non-stock items, special-order parts, and one-off requests never get forced into a bad match. They're flagged for a rep with the customer's exact wording and any close candidates. You decide. The system remembers and applies it next time. More on why non-stock matters.
Numbers from the field
Every number below comes from real customer accounts, measured against ground truth set by their own team. If a number gets challenged, we trace it back to the actual extractions and walk through what we see.
Line-item extraction accuracy
Typical first-pass on well-formed inputs
Inbound to quote sent
Typical for qualifying RFQs and POs
Quotes auto-handled
For mature customers on configured flows
Built for the messy stuff
Industrial buyers don't send clean structured data. They send what they've always sent. The pipeline is tuned for the cases that quietly break generic AI tools.
Phone photo of a handwritten PO
Vision models handle marker on paper, blue-pen signatures, and stamped received-date markings without losing the line items underneath.
Forwarded chain with three attachments
Three attachments and a forwarded chain unify into one request. Duplicate lines get de-duped before they hit your team.
Five-word RFQs with missing information
A two-line email asking for “your best price on a hundred 5/8 zinc hex” gets parsed into structured fields with assumptions made explicit.
Customer part numbers you've never seen
Unknown crosswalks get flagged the first time and remembered after you confirm the mapping. Next order from the same buyer flows through clean.
Built for complex catalogs
Most quoting tools fall apart on real industrial catalogs. Tens of thousands of SKUs. Customer part numbers that don't match anyone else's. Three-line descriptions where one character (zinc vs. zinc-plated, hex vs. socket head) flips the right answer. ChannelFlex was built for exactly that.
Industrial distribution and manufacturing cover a lot of ground. Electrical, plumbing, industrial MRO, safety, abrasives, hose and fittings, hydraulics, fasteners. Each vertical has its own SKU schemas, customer crosswalks, and substitution rules. ChannelFlex handles all of it. Whether you're a fastener distributor, an electrical wholesaler, an industrial MRO supplier, or a manufacturer fielding partner POs, the same pipeline reads the inbound work, matches parts against your catalog, and puts a structured quote or sales order on a rep's screen.
Customer-specific crosswalks. Fuzzy match on descriptions and specs. Substitutions surfaced with the original line still attached. Special-order requests routed for review with the customer's exact wording, not a guess.
The AI does the work. Your reps make the calls.
Nobody wants full automation on day one. The customer relationship is too valuable to hand off to a model that's still learning your business. So we built ChannelFlex with rep approval at every level you want it.
You set the rules: auto-approve under a dollar amount, above a margin threshold, or only for low-touch accounts. Anything outside the rules routes to a person. Nothing flows to your ERP without a rep approving it.
Day one, route every quote and order for review. As your team gets comfortable with what the AI gets right, turn on more automation. Some teams end up auto-handling nine out of ten quotes within a few months, with reps focused on the one that genuinely needs a person.
Quoted $42.10, PO says $38.50
No catalog match for customer part #
No inventory or vendor catalog match
Where your team's day actually goes
Whether you're a distributor or a manufacturer, inside sales spends most of the day on quoting, order entry, and data cleanup. Not selling. ChannelFlex takes over the repetitive part so your team can spend their time on customers, relationships, and the calls that actually move revenue.
Before ChannelFlex
After ChannelFlex
Your data stays your data
ChannelFlex handles customer order history, pricing, and vendor catalogs. We treat that data the way we'd want ours treated.
Encrypted in transit and at rest
Customer data is encrypted on every hop in and on every disk it touches.
Your data is not pooled into shared models
Your catalog, crosswalks, and quoting history aren't used to train models that other customers benefit from. Anything the system learns from your corrections stays inside your account.
Access is logged and limited
Production data access is restricted to engineers responding to specific customer issues, and every access is logged.
Vendor security review
For prospects with formal security reviews, we'll walk through our current documentation on request.
Built by people who have done this work
The team has spent more time in warehouses, branches, and plants than in pitch competitions. We don't have a kombucha tap or a 50-page AI manifesto. We have customers who send us real RFQs and POs and tell us where the software still gets in the way. That's what we fix.
We get better as the models get better. The difference shows up the first time the system handles a messy PDF, a phone photo of a PO, or a buyer's ten-year-old part number that other tools quietly miss.
See what your team looks like quoting and entering orders 5x faster.
30 minutes with our team. We'll walk through how ChannelFlex fits your quoting and order entry setup.
Book a demo →