The 8 Best Sales Order Entry
Automation Tools for B2B Companies

Rossum is a purpose-built intelligent document processing platform with strong accuracy on structured and semi-structured documents. It uses a transformer-based model trained on large volumes of business documents, which gives it good out-of-the-box performance on invoices, purchase orders, and delivery notes without requiring extensive custom training.

For companies that need to extract structured data from high volumes of incoming documents and push it to downstream systems via API, Rossum is a credible choice. It has a clean interface for human review of low-confidence extractions, and its API-first design means it can connect to most ERP systems with integration work.

Rossum is an extraction tool, not a workflow automation tool. After it extracts data from a document, that data still needs to go somewhere, which means integration development, a human review step, or a separate automation layer to handle ERP updates, outbound communication, and exception routing. For companies that want to automate order intake end-to-end, Rossum covers step one of five.

ABBYY is one of the most established names in document processing. Vantage is their current IDP platform, designed for enterprise-grade document understanding across a wide range of document types. It offers strong accuracy on complex documents, robust support for handwritten and low-quality scanned inputs, and a large library of pre-trained document "skills" for common business document types.

For large organizations with complex document processing requirements across multiple workflows, ABBYY Vantage provides a broad platform with significant configurability.

ABBYY Vantage is an enterprise platform with enterprise complexity and enterprise pricing. For mid-market companies whose primary use case is sales order intake, the scope is significantly wider than needed. Implementation typically involves professional services, and the platform is most cost-effective when deployed across multiple document types and workflows rather than a single use case.

Tungsten Automation, the rebrand of Kofax, which previously acquired ReadSoft, offers one of the most established SAP-integrated document processing solutions on the market. ReadSoft's original reputation was built on automated invoice and order processing for SAP environments, and that SAP-native integration remains its clearest strength.

For large enterprises deeply embedded in SAP that need document processing tightly coupled to SAP workflows, Tungsten provides integration depth that API-based tools require significant custom work to replicate.

Tungsten has gone through several ownership and rebranding cycles (ReadSoft to Kofax to Tungsten Automation), which has created some inconsistency in product development and support continuity. The platform is primarily designed for enterprise environments and is not well-suited for mid-market companies without significant IT resources.

Conexiom specializes in automating order intake from structured, high-volume input channels, particularly EDI, customer portals, and consistently formatted PDF orders. Its core proposition is 100% touchless processing for orders that arrive in formats where the data is reliably structured. For distributors with large customers who send orders via EDI, Conexiom removes a significant manual processing burden.

It is also well-regarded in industrial distribution and manufacturing supply chains in North America, where high-volume EDI order flows between large buyers and their distributors are common.

Conexiom is built for structured input. Its performance on unstructured orders (free-text emails, variable PDF layouts, multilingual orders from smaller customers) is not its design target. For mid-market B2B distributors in Europe whose order mix includes a significant proportion of email-based, informal, or multilingual orders from SMB customers, Conexiom addresses only part of the problem.

SAP's own order management capabilities within S/4HANA are comprehensive for companies already operating within the SAP ecosystem. For organizations where orders arrive via EDI, customer portals, or internal sales reps entering orders directly into the system, SAP's native order management handles the downstream workflow well: availability checks, pricing logic, delivery scheduling, invoicing.

If your order intake problem is primarily about downstream process management rather than intake of unstructured inbound orders, SAP's native capabilities may already solve much of what you need.

SAP does not solve the front-door problem. When orders arrive by email as PDFs, Excel files, or free-text messages, they still need to be manually entered into SAP by a human. SAP Order Management assumes the data is already in the system in a structured form.

Salesforce Order Management is designed for companies that use Salesforce as their primary customer relationship and commerce platform. It handles order lifecycle management (capture, fulfillment, returns, customer communication) within the Salesforce ecosystem. For B2C or B2B companies running their sales process entirely within Salesforce, it provides tight integration between CRM data, customer accounts, and order status.

Salesforce Order Management is built for orders that originate within Salesforce: from a configured CPQ process, a commerce cloud storefront, or a sales rep creating an order directly in the system. It is not designed to receive and interpret unstructured inbound orders from external customers sending emails and PDFs.

Esker is a document automation platform with strong coverage across both accounts payable and accounts receivable workflows. On the AR side, which is where sales order automation sits, Esker processes incoming customer orders from multiple channels (email, EDI, fax, portal) and routes them through a configured approval and entry workflow. It has established market presence in Europe and works well in environments where order volume is high and document formats are reasonably consistent.

Esker is often positioned as a step up from pure OCR tools because it includes workflow routing, a human review interface, and ERP integration. For companies that have outgrown basic document extraction and need a structured process layer around it, Esker is a reasonable mid-market to enterprise option.

Esker is primarily a process orchestration tool. It captures order data, routes it through a defined workflow, and passes it to the ERP, but the intelligence is in the routing rules, not in contextual understanding of the order itself. Exception handling is workflow-driven rather than context-driven: exceptions go to the configured queue, not to a structured resolution card with the conflict and suggested action already assembled.