- Case Studies
Elnur
- Country: United Kingdom
- Industry: Office Products
- B2BE Solutions: *EDI
Overview
Elnur is a European manufacturer of electric heating solutions, supplying wholesalers and retailers across more than 35 countries.
How a European electric heating manufacturer took charge of its order processing and unlocked an entire team for sales and cash collection.
- 90% straight-through processing
- 5 → 3 on order admin
- 2 redeployed to sales and technical support
Download the case study to see how B2BE has helped
The Challenge
Elnur manufactures electric heating products sold through electrical wholesalers and retailers. Only 10% of their purchase orders arrived via EDI. The other 90% came as PDF email attachments.
Five people in customer service spent their days on the same task. Every PDF had to be opened, keyed into Sage 200 line by line, checked against part numbers and pricing and tagged with analysis codes for sales reporting. Every order required careful handling.
Every order was manual. The team had no capacity for anything else. Less members of staff chasing outstanding invoices, supporting sales initiatives and the function existed to process sales order admin and returns and it consumed most hours available.
“Each new customer order increased the volume of PDFs and manual data entry required. As the business grew, we needed to hire additional staff simply to maintain the same processes at a larger scale. That was not a sustainable operating model.”
— Gareth Parden, Operation Manager
The Solution
Rather than waiting for the rest of its customer base to adopt EDI, Elnur took a proactive approach by implementing B2BE’s eCapture to digitise the 90% of customer orders still received as PDFs. eCapture converts inbound PDF purchase orders into structured, digital data. From there, every order—whether received through eCapture or EDI—passes through Guardian, where it undergoes a consistent validation process before being processed further.
Each order is validated against Elnur’s master data before it reaches Sage 200. Product codes are confirmed, pricing is verified, and any discrepancies are automatically identified and flagged as exceptions for the customer service team to review. The platform also captures the full context of every order by analysing the email subject line, email body and any notes contained within the PDF itself. This ensures that important customer instructions—such as requests marked “urgent,” “collection” or “before 10am”—are identified immediately and acted upon, rather than being overlooked during manual processing.
Elnur’s own business rules are applied automatically as each order is processed. Analysis codes are assigned to every order line to support accurate sales reporting, eliminating a repetitive manual task that previously relied on staff consistently applying the correct coding to every order.
By routing both EDI and eCapture orders through the same Guardian validation process, Elnur has established a single, standardised order processing workflow regardless of how an order is received. As more customers transition to EDI, their orders seamlessly follow the same process without requiring additional configuration or changes to internal systems. The result is a scalable platform that grows with the business, enabling Elnur to expand without having to redesign its order processing infrastructure as customer adoption evolves.
“The system was designed so that orders meeting all validation criteria are processed automatically, without requiring manual intervention. That represented a significant change for us. Instead of reviewing every order individually, we now focus only on the exceptions where the system identifies a discrepancy.
There was an initial period of building confidence in the validation process, but it quickly became clear that the exceptions being flagged were genuine issues that required attention. Once we saw the consistency and accuracy of the validation, we were able to trust the system and stop manually checking orders that had already passed.”
— Gareth Parden, Operation Manager
The Result
Today, approximately 90% of PDF purchase orders are processed automatically into Sage 200, with no manual intervention required.
The remaining 10% are routed as exceptions—not due to system limitations, but because of issues in the customer’s original purchase order, such as incorrect product codes or outdated pricing. Each exception is flagged with the specific validation error, letting the customer service team resolve it quickly without investigating the whole order.
As a result, Elnur’s customer service team has shrunk from five people focused on manual data entry to three managing exceptions. The role itself has changed too: instead of entering data, the team now resolves genuine customer issues and keeps orders moving—work that’s both more valuable and more engaging.
Reinvesting Capacity into Higher-Value Activities
The capacity created through automation was not used to reduce headcount. Instead, Elnur redeployed employees into activities that support business growth and improve financial performance.
Supporting new sales initiatives
The team now has the capacity to support programmes developed in partnership with sister companies, including initiatives that supply electric heating products to energy-inefficient and vulnerable households. This has created an additional revenue-generating sales channel that the business previously lacked the resources to pursue.
Improving cash collection
Team members also dedicate time to proactively managing outstanding customer invoices. Strengthening credit control has had a direct, positive impact on cash flow—work that had previously been deprioritised while staff were fully occupied with manual order processing.
“We’ve been able to redeploy people into activities that add far greater value to the business. Team members are now supporting invoice collection and contributing to a range of sales initiatives and customer programmes. Those opportunities existed before, but we simply didn’t have the capacity to pursue them because everyone was focused on manually processing orders.
It’s the same team, but they’re now spending their time on work that has a much greater impact on the business. The two people managing exceptions actually prefer the role because they’re solving genuine customer issues rather than working through a queue of repetitive data entry.”
— Darryl Stewart, 3M e-business Development Specialist.