Turning an inbox of email orders into automatic system entries

A Retail business working with Cloud Combinator on AWS. The client is anonymised at their request.

The challenge had three focus areas, each one standing between the team and less manual work.

We scoped the work as a proof of concept on the email channel, deliberately kept narrow so it could be validated quickly and be ready before the Christmas peak, with a clear path to production afterwards.

The design delivers an automated path from an emailed order to a created OrderWise entry with no manual re-keying, built to fail safely and to keep a full record of every order it handles. The figures below are the success criteria set for the proof of concept rather than measured production results.

• Hands-off ingestion — Amazon SES and S3 capture every order email automatically, with a S3 event kicking off processing the moment an order lands.
• AI-powered extraction — Claude 3.5 Sonnet on Amazon Bedrock reads free-text and PDF orders and outputs clean JSON mapped to the OrderWise schema, with an optional self-verification step.
• Straight-through to OrderWise — Extracted orders are submitted via the OrderWise API with the confirmation-email flag set, removing the manual entry step entirely.
• Safe by default — Every interaction is logged in DynamoDB, and failures raise an alert to the sales team so no order is silently lost.
• Handover — Delivered as a proof of concept with a defined path to production, so the client can move from validation to daily use with confidence.

With the concept proven on the email channel, the intended next steps are hardening the pipeline for production ahead of the Christmas peak and quantifying the time saved per order to establish return on investment. These are forward-looking directions from the proposal rather than delivered outcomes.