Case Study | How The Howard Elliott Collection cut manual order entry from 4 hours to 15 minutes with AI — B2BEA

Case Study Overview

The Howard Elliott Collection is a home accents wholesaler serving retailers and interior designers across North America. Like many wholesale businesses, the company still receives a significant volume of orders through emails, PDFs, and faxes, formats that do not fit neatly into modern ecommerce workflows. As order volume increased, the cost of handling those manual orders began to add up, both in time spent and in the risk of errors.

“Ella has completely changed how we handle emailed and faxed orders. It’s saving hours of time every day for my team.” – Colleen Daly | VP, The Howard Elliott Collection

The challenge – Manual order entry consuming half the workday

Before Ella, Howard Elliott’s customer service team spent a large portion of every day manually entering orders. Purchase orders arrived in many formats, sometimes as attachments, sometimes written directly in email bodies, and occasionally missing key details.

Each order had to be reviewed carefully to confirm customer records, pricing, ship-to addresses, and item details. This process took three to four hours every day and pulled the team away from higher-value customer service work. Errors were an ongoing risk, especially when pricing or address information was outdated.

“Manually entering emailed and faxed orders was tedious and took time away from serving customers.” – Colleen Daly | VP, The Howard Elliott Collection

The turning point – AI order entry instead of human retyping

Howard Elliott adopted Ella, AI order and quote automation assistant, to remove manual re-entry from the order workflow. Instead of deciphering emails and PDFs line by line, the team now forwards orders directly to Ella with minimal guidance when needed.

Ella processes the order, extracts line items, validates customer and pricing data, and surfaces the order inside WizCommerce for quick review. What once took hours of manual work is now reduced to a short verification step before the order flows into the system.

“Ella processes orders in about 15 minutes, sometimes even faster, and they show up right in our dashboard.” – Colleen Daly | VP, The Howard Elliott Collection

Result – Hours reclaimed and errors eliminated

With Ella in place, Howard Elliott reduced order entry time from three to four hours per day to a matter of minutes per order. Reviewing an AI-processed order now takes around five minutes, freeing the customer service team to focus on customer communication instead of data entry.

Ella also flags discrepancies automatically. Pricing mismatches, incorrect addresses, and missing details are surfaced before orders move forward, eliminating the order entry mistakes that previously required follow-ups and corrections.

The result is a faster, cleaner order flow that scales without adding headcount.

“We’re not seeing order entry errors anymore because the human entry isn’t there.” – Colleen Daly | , VP, The Howard Elliott Collection

Case Study Snapshot

Industry

Home Goods & Furniture

Technology

(https://www.b2bea.org/directory/technology/wizcommerce),

Services

AI, Automation

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Contributed by: (https://www.b2bea.org/directory/company/wizcommerce)