Stop Entering Orders Manually: CERM Uses AI to Turn Emails into Orders

Because press speed stopped being the only bottleneck long ago. The real hold-up is usually the time customer service spends every morning sorting through weird, messy orders in their inbox

Every time you tour a plant, owners love bragging about how fast their new press runs. Walk over to customer service and prepress, though, and it is a disaster. Orders come in every shape and form: plain text, PDF attachments, Excel sheets, even scanned handwritten notes. Staff have to decipher these cryptic files line by line, dig up old records in the system to cross-check specs, and re-enter everything into their MIS. It is slow, draining, and full of mistakes. When order intake jams up at the front desk, expensive machines sit idle on the floor. That is the daily headache across packaging and label printing right now, and it is the exact real-world problem CERM is targeting with this new tool

Lexis automatically reads incoming emails and attachments, checks the details against the plant's MIS database in real time, and creates a sales order in the background, ready for approval

According to The Packaging Portal, Lexis, the cloud AI agent recently rolled out by CERM, goes far beyond basic optical character recognition (OCR). It steps directly into the order workflow. When a customer email arrives, Lexis identifies the customer and the requested print specs. More importantly, it connects with your existing MIS data in real time. The CSR's job shifts from typing and hunting down data line by line to simply glancing at the screen and clicking confirm. Official figures show that after debuting at user conferences in Paris and Dallas in 2026, 20 customers have already deployed Lexis live. That means this approach has moved past the proof-of-concept phase and onto real production floors

Do not rush to buy tools just yet. The prerequisite for adopting this kind of automated order intake is having your customer records and part numbers thoroughly standardized

If your customer data is a mess, your item numbering lacks logic, or your pricing and substrate rules exist only inside a veteran pressman's head, AI will not help. Even if it reads the customer's email perfectly, it will never match the request to the right item in your system. Feed AI garbage, and it will generate wrong orders at light speed. Standardizing internal data and workflows is the first hard hurdle you have to clear before automated intake can work. If you are unsure whether your commercial workflows are digitally ready, bring in the Mai Strategy Knowledge Academy consulting team for an on-site audit. Getting your quoting and order SOPs in order is the real first step to catching this AI wave on solid ground

・The new battlefield for print capacity has shifted from press speed to front-end order intake automation

・The real value of AI order entry is not optical character recognition, but semantic understanding across file formats and real-time cross-referencing with your MIS

・Before rolling out automated AI order entry, shops must standardize customer master data and part numbers, or they will just make mistakes faster

When order entry and data logging shrink to seconds thanks to AI, sales reps and CSRs can redirect their attention to higher-margin work: coordinating rush jobs, consulting on specialty finishing techniques, or nurturing key accounts. For print shop operators, instead of obsessing solely over press uptime on the shop floor, it is time to look closely at the front office and see just how much staff time is trapped in mindless copy-pasting

・CERM launches Lexis, an AI Agent that converts customer emails into CERM sales orders