93% Item Recognition: How Steel Trader Köstner Automates Quotes and Orders with Agentic AI

Köstner Stahlzentrum handles around 1,000 orders and prepares about 1,500 quotes every week. Before turian, the team screened the emails in the central inbox manually and then entered quotes and orders by hand in the ERP system (enventa).

The challenge lay in the high number of requests, the many line items per document and the wide product range: around 20,000 items in different steel grades, plus more than 15,000 customer accounts. Every second request arrives as plain email text, and every fifth line item is a cut-to-length piece. Orders and requests usually contain no item number, only a technical description of the product. New employees in particular often lacked the product knowledge for this.

turian reads the inboxes automatically. Quotes and orders are created directly in the enventa ERP system via the interface, while emails with other content are moved to a clarification folder. The time-consuming manual entry of documents in the ERP is now almost entirely eliminated.

For Köstner, very high product recognition was essential, which is no trivial task in steel trading. What tipped the decision in favour of turian was the trusting collaboration from the very beginning, along with the contractual, technical and commercial terms.

Since implementation began, turian has created more than 25,000 quotes and orders with 86,000 line items in enventa. In October, the sales team accepted 92.9% of the line items suggested by turian without changes. For cut-to-length pieces, turian recognises the correct length in 96.3% of cases.

The time saved goes into sales and customer support. The sales team works more intensively with the CRM system and is tapping into further sales potential.

According to Trautner, without turian everyday work would be far more dominated by manual routine data entry.

For Köstner, it is important that employees stay involved and make the final decisions themselves. Simple quotes, for example, are processed by turian fully automatically and sent to the enventa ERP, where the sales team gives the final approval.