u/Square_File_4617

Some of u pinged me on costs of automation, ROI, change mgmt, adoption, and vendor details!

To give a quick high-level view, we built an AI pipeline with our vendor that ingests messy hospital POs/case sheets, auto-matches SKUs and contracted prices, and intercepts mismatches before orders hit the ERP. It continuously learns from CSR feedback—we went from 55% to 85% auto-created sales orders in just two weeks, while stopping the re-bill nightmare and giving me 100% real-time pipeline visibility.

Since we’re PE-backed, our PE company actually had us put together a complete teardown report covering the whole implementation—exact ROI numbers, vendor pros/cons, cost breakdown, and how we handled CSR change management, so that they can share it with theeir other portoflio companies. i can share subset of those items which i am allowed to share..

If you want a copy of the report, just ping me and I’ll send it over!

totally agree on the edge-case concern. we had the exact same fear given how messy hospital billing is.

we took the plunge recently and the results surprised us. started at ~55% automation on week one, but because the software ingested our tribal context and CSR feedback, we hit ~85% auto-created sales orders within a few weeks. main gain for me as CFO wasn't just trimming DSO days—it was finally getting 100% real-time visibility into order volumes and pricing mismatches before they turn into bad invoices.

if you’re looking into PO->Invoice automation, happy to compare notes on what worked for our stack!

100% felt this. internal change management was honestly harder than the technical integration.

our CSR team was super lukewarm at first because they genuinely thought the AI was coming to replace their jobs. I had to spend a lot of time motivating the team and shifting the narrative: this isn't replacing them, it's taking away the mindless line-by-line SKU matching so they aren't drowning in data entry.

what won them over was starting small—we ran it alongside just one CSR first. once she saw the AI learning her comments and taking the grunt work off her plate (going from 55% to 85% automation in a couple of weeks), the rest of the team actually wanted in.

did you run into pushback from your ops/CSR side, or is it more of an IT bottleneck for you guys?

man, that was our single biggest worry going in. in med device, hospital POs and reps' handwritten case sheets are an absolute disaster, and every hospital has its own tribal pricing rules.

we originally thought about a pure service provider, but ended up going with a vendor that took a product approach with AI that could actually ingest contextual rules.

the biggest lesson for us: it’s an iterative loop. when we went live with just one CSR's email queue, we were only hitting about 55% auto-creation. but as she corrected errors and dropped in notes/comments, the system kept learning those edge-case rules. two weeks in, we shot up to 85% of sales orders auto-created in the ERP without manual entry.

catching those pricing mismatches before the sales order is generated completely stopped the re-bill nightmare for those orders. happy to share how we mapped out those tribal rules if you're wrestling with the same setup!

thanks for sharing. so when you signed yourself, did they cross check who signed it during payment.. Did you have any problem getting paid when you sign.. or getting paid at all?

Do you have experience working in smaller or mid size companies? I may know some folks that may need..

thanks for sharing details. So beyond visibilkity, was there any gain in terms of faster processing? did it free up 'labor'? also did you have it custom built or use some SaaS tool? we could not fiund any of the vendor tools work as we had way too much business rules :)

do i get paid only when i do meetings? or i get a monthly retainer? i know some folks they work on a retaienr basis.. or is it commission only position?

this is a good insight.. what is a 'meaningful size'? 20 headcount? 100... ?
I know a 4 person hybrid friehgt agent, who is half-techi half broker and built his own TMS using claude.. but another broker with 15 people, came to us to build some stuff...

The people who actually "enjoy" cold calling usually don't enjoy the repetitive dials—they enjoy the high-octane feedback loop and gamification of it.

Cold calling is the fastest way to test messaging, handle objections in real time, and get a direct "yes" or "no" instead of sending 500 emails into an automated void.

The reps who thrive on cold calls usually share three things: