Foodservice Co-op Matches Supplier Confirmations Touchless
Quick Summary
UniPro Foodservice, a North American distribution cooperative with more than 400 supplier partners, uses AI to read order confirmations in whatever format each supplier sends and match them against purchase orders in Dynamics 365. About 93% now process with no human touch.
The Use Case
Every supplier confirms orders differently: PDFs, email bodies, spreadsheets, each with its own layout. The procurement team reviewed every confirmation by hand, and any template-based automation broke the moment a supplier changed its format. UniPro deployed a Nanonets workflow that extracts the data without per-supplier templates, applies plain-English rules written for each supplier, matches the confirmation to the PO, checks pricing, substitutions and shipping terms, and posts the clean ones. Only exceptions reach a person.
Real Example
- A supplier emails a confirmation as a PDF with a layout the team has never seen
- The workflow picks it up from the inbox and extracts line items, prices, quantities and ship dates
- It applies the supplier's rules (for example, this supplier lists case counts, not units)
- It matches each line to the open purchase order in Dynamics 365
- Pricing, substitutions and shipping terms are checked; two lines with a price change are flagged
- The clean lines post automatically and a buyer reviews only the two flagged lines
Why It Matters
- 93% of confirmations are fully touchless, up from manual review of every document
- About 10,000 hours a year returned to the procurement team
- Confirmation turnaround is 15x faster, and a supplier format change no longer breaks the process