Anyone who deals with processing customer orders knows what an arduous and time-consuming task it can be.

And advances in technology haven’t exactly made the job easier: for wholesale food and drink suppliers, as well as all the traditional phone and email orders, there are now hundreds more coming in daily via a growing number of online platforms. 

For the past 6 months we have been working hard to develop and refine REKKI Connect, a tool for wholesalers which utilises AI to read all the orders coming in from every different source, and process them automatically.

No matter whether orders are coming in via email or voicemail, typed into a pdf, or placed through REKKI or any other online portal, REKKI Connect can extract the relevant data and remove the need for manual data entry.

We've been lucky enough to partner with some amazing suppliers – Savona Foodservice, Rushton's Greengrocers, Seven Seeded and Liberty Wines to name a few – who have helped us refine and improve the product. Those who have been trialling REKKI Connect over the last 6 months have reported up to a 90% reduction in the time spent processing orders.

One supplier that was dealing with two mistakes a day on their 300 daily deliveries went to zero mistakes within just three weeks of using REKKI Connect, while another found they could reduce their team of five order processors to just one, enabling the others to have greatly expanded roles within the company. 

“The response from suppliers so far has been incredible. They can’t believe this can be done because there are so many orders on so many systems coming from all different directions."

Ronen Givon, REKKI's founder

"We built a tool for it because we realise that not every customer uses REKKI and we don’t expect suppliers to tell their customers how to order.”

The fact that REKKI Connect is AI-based means it can interpret messages in a way that a regular software tool wouldn’t be able to. 

For instance, if a chef leaves a voicemail message saying they want to order two sacks of flour and then changes to four sacks, the system will understand the revised instruction. 

Also, if a foreign chef is making an order via voicemail, they can speak in their native language and REKKI Connect will translate it accurately, thus eliminating the errors often caused by messages left in broken English. 

What’s more, once a customer has placed a repeat order, the system has the ability to recognise it from the previous occasion and automatically uploads it.

“AI brings in common sense to software, so you don’t need to put a human there on these repetitive, mechanical jobs.”

Liberty Wines, which processes 130,000 orders a year from its customers across hospitality and retail, has been using REKKI Connect for six weeks. The company’s Systems and Automation Developer, Danny Hargitai, says:

“About 50% of our orders come in via these many ordering portals that don’t allow you to control the data coming in, which means we’re stuck in this perpetual cycle of receiving orders that tend to come in with a lack of information."

Wholesale bakery Seven Seeded, which supplies 400 customers a week across London, has been using REKKI Connect for six months.

“The Connect model is exactly what we need. We’re not at the stage where we’re realising the true potential of it yet, but even in the training phase we’re already seeing about a 40% time saving on processing the portal orders alone - it’s exciting.”

David Dwek, CEO Seven Seeded

The company is currently processing half of its 2,000 weekly orders via Connect and is already saving over 100 hours a week as a result. 

Seven Seeded CEO David Dwek says: “The beauty of working with REKKI Connect is that on half of our orders now, no one’s doing anything with them, they just come straight into our invoicing system.

“It’s great for our customers because they can just continue doing what they’re doing, ordering on their own portals, and we don’t have to start creating integrations with them on our platform because we have that one integration that fits everything.”

And while the company’s customer base has grown in the last six months, due to the time savings created by REKKI Connect, Seven Seeded hasn’t needed to recruit more staff in order to cope. 

“It would’ve been difficult to grow at the same rate without the time savings REKKI Connect gives us,” says Dwek. 

“For the team that processes all the orders it’s an amazing thing because it’s very, very liberating not having to key in 1,500 orders a week, and it’s helped us from a sales perspective because no ordering method is a pain for us now.”

Learn more about REKKI Connect and book a demo.