Construction materials distribution - 5 locations

From retyping to reviewing.

73% of incoming order emails now become a draft order in Dynamics 365 on their own.

AI is a topic everywhere. The real challenge is creating concrete value with it. Together we tackled a recognisable problem and translated it quickly into a practical solution that works right away.

Robert Broeckmans - Finance & IT Director

SIG Benelux

73%

Order emails turned into a draft order

88%

Order lines matched right first time

4 weeks

From idea to production

ROI: From 5 to 7 minutes of retyping to an order you only review

At a glance

Organisation: SIG Benelux, part of SIG plc
What they do: Distribution of construction and technical insulation materials
Locations: Waalwijk, The Hague, Leiden, Nijkerk and Hasselt
The process: Order entry from the central order mailbox
Systems: Microsoft Dynamics 365, automated through Lleverage.ai
Sponsor: Robert Broeckmans (Finance & IT) and Ditte Smit (Marketing)
Timeline: Kickstart from 11 May to 8 June 2026, followed by a six-month programme

The Situation

An order at SIG is rarely a clean order line. Around 3% of orders carry an article number, roughly 47% only have a description, and the rest arrives as a WhatsApp message or a photo pasted into an email. And then there is the customer asking for a hundred metres of ceiling. The sales desk knows what they mean. Thousands of orders come in every month, and all of them were retyped by hand: the customer's email on the left, the ERP on the right. One order took 5 to 7 minutes, up to fifteen for a composite order.

Our Approach

Four weeks, one location, one process: the central order mailbox in Waalwijk. The solution sits alongside the ERP rather than inside it. Dynamics stays the administrative base, the AI reads the order and prepares it.

Timeline

Weeks 1 and 2
On the shop floor
Four in-depth interviews with the sales desk, a strategy session with the management team, and reading along in the real order mailbox. No assumptions about the process, just watching how it actually runs.
Weeks 3 and 4
Building and shadow running
The AI processed order emails alongside the team, so you see where it fails without any customer noticing. At the closing presentation roughly 40% of orders came through the flow at a usable level.
8 June 2026
In production
Not a sandbox, but real orders from the central Waalwijk mailbox. A week later SIG decided to continue with a six-month programme.
July 2026
73% and climbing
Measured in production over eleven working days. The line runs from 0 to roughly 40% at delivery to 73% in July. SIG wants to reach 95% by the end of December.

The Result

It has been running in production since 8 June 2026. Not a walled-off test environment but real orders from the central Waalwijk mailbox. Across eleven working days in July there were no incidents or disruptions in production use.

Before / After

Manual

Every order retyped by hand: email on the left, ERP on the right
5 to 7 minutes per order, up to fifteen for a composite order
Opening and assessing every email yourself to see what was needed
Product knowledge lived in people and was written down nowhere
No time to ask the customer questions, because it lengthens processing

With SPAIK

The order waits in Dynamics 365, the salesperson reviews and approves
73% of order emails become a draft order on their own
The mail is sorted into five buckets, you see the needed action at once
The order history does the translation work, also for people who are new
Room for quotes, thinking along in projects, and cross- and upsell

From the sales desk

Patrick Wijers runs the internal sales desk. Before SPAIK came in, he had already spoken to several parties who said they could do order entry with AI. They dropped out themselves once they saw what SIG was asking for.

The parties we had spoken to before you were cowboys. So I was fairly sceptical when we started with you.

Those first emails were the moment. You saw it recognise the customer, pick out the delivery date, the contact person and even a number of articles. That is when you know you can take this further.

You deliberately leave questions unasked, because asking makes the processing take longer. You would want to ask, but there is no time. That is being made possible now.

You do what you say. You never promised us anything you did not deliver.

Patrick Wijers, Sales Desk Manager

Questions up front

Why not adapt the ERP, or build it yourselves?

Customising Dynamics 365 was the obvious route. It would have cost more and been less flexible. Building it in-house was seriously considered too. SIG chose speed, hands-on experience and knowledge transfer, on one hard condition: they had to be able to run it themselves in the end.

Our data is a mess. Can this still work?

That was the biggest question at SIG too, not the technology. The answer was in the order history: it holds the translations staff have been making for years. You do not need anyone to write the rules down, the system reads the earlier translations.

I knew the technology made this possible. My biggest question was the quality of our data. It was a positive surprise to see the order history was enough of a base to get results this fast.

Ditte Smit, Marketing Director

What does this do to my people?

The question gets asked, at SIG too, half as a joke: will I still be needed here in a year. The work shifts from doing to reviewing, and that asks something of a manager. There was less resistance than expected, because workload was so high that any improvement was welcome.

The hardest thing for an employee is letting go. Normally you are the one saying: I have this, I will make that of it, I press the button. Now this part of the work becomes reviewing.

Patrick Wijers, Sales Desk Manager

Will we become dependent on you?

That was SIG's hard condition, which is why the handover ran from day one instead of at the end. Four colleagues trained as AI lead, each with their own project. Two IT colleagues run the platform and are the first point of contact when something breaks. You understand AI best by building with it, so we ran a hackathon with the management team and the AI leads together. Five teams each built a digital competitor in a single day, not as a demo but to feel how fast it moves.

What I find powerful is that this is not only about technology. Through the hackathon and the AI leads we are building knowledge inside the organisation as well. And because the solution showed results quickly, trust followed. That makes people think up new applications themselves. In the end that development has to come from the organisation itself.

Ditte Smit, Marketing Director

What is not done yet

The automation still sees one channel
We started with the central order mailbox, good for roughly 15% of all orders. Phone, WhatsApp and the local mailboxes are next.
Changes and cancellations are still manual
Only new orders go into the machine. That was a choice: better one order type finished than three halfway.
95% is an ambition, not a guarantee
SIG wants to be there by the end of December. The challenge is not building a smarter machine, it is getting the customer and product data and the integrations in order.

In closing

SPAIK combines process acceleration with a pragmatic approach. Their people are not at a distance, they work alongside you on the floor and genuinely feel like part of the team.

Robert Broeckmans, Finance & IT Director