Customer case study
How PECO enters sales orders into Kinetic with lowki.ai
A family manufacturer in Seaton, Devon uses Lexi by lowki.ai to take the typing out of part of its sales order entry. Here is how, told by the people who use it every day.
Visit peco-uk.comSaid partway through our interview
“I'm actually using [lowki.ai] right now. So I couldn't have done that before, could I? I'm listening, but I'm actually putting on orders as well.”
- Location
- Seaton, Devon
- ERP
- Epicor Kinetic
- Live since
- February 2026
PECO figures are estimates from Kat Mitchell, ERP Development Manager, November 2026. Go-live effort is Kat's own account.
Before lowki.ai
Orders arrive three ways, and none is quick to enter
Pritchard Patent Product Co. (PECO) is a family business in Seaton, Devon, founded in 1946 and known for its model railway products. It has run Lexi by lowki.ai on Epicor Kinetic since February 2026, and lowki.ai now enters around 3,500 of its order lines a month.
Typed into the email
Entered by hand, line by line.
Attached as a PDF
Entered by hand, line by line.
Sent as an Excel file
Cut and pasted by the team.
When PECO first went live on Kinetic, before lowki.ai, a 300-line order took the team around three and a half to four hours to type in by hand.
“We created a spreadsheet for customers to fill in so that we could then copy and paste, but sometimes even using that was quite long winded.”
PECO hadn't looked at EDI or other automation tools before lowki.ai. The team had tried solving the problem themselves with formatted spreadsheet templates for customers to fill in, but adoption was inconsistent and the underlying manual entry remained. During busy periods the team was also pulling in help from finance just to keep on top of order volume.
Getting started
Live in days, with no integration project
Mark Betts, founder of lowki.ai, spent one day on the technical deployment and one working directly with the sales team.
Kat's summary of the back-end work: it didn't affect IT massively.
There was no integration project to plan around. PECO went live in a matter of days.
“I think the back end side of it was probably less than a day's worth of work to get us going… it didn't affect IT massively.”
“There wasn't weeks worth of work to put in before we could go live with it. It was literally done in a matter of days… in a matter of hours, really.”
Day to day
Drop the email in a folder and carry on
The team moves each order email, with its PDF or Excel attachment, into a designated folder in their email client. lowki.ai enters the order while they get on with other work, and they check it afterwards.
Several orders can go in at once, while the team gets on with something else.
It enters the order into Kinetic as a sales order and flags anything it's unsure of.
They check quantities, add back orders and special offers, and confirm anything that has been flagged.
Each order in Kinetic links back to the original email and attachments, so there's always something to check against.
“You could drop [a big order] in the folder, and whilst it's doing that, you could be actually looking at the back orders to get that ready to put together. So it just allows you to crack on and do other elements without just waiting for one to be done.”
“When we're doing a copy and paste, obviously we don't then have the order attached to the sales order. Whereas obviously when we use [lowki.ai], we have that in the system.”
Results
What changed at PECO
lowki.ai enters around 3,500 of PECO's order lines a month, and the team checks each order it enters.
Several orders at once
Five big orders can go into the folder together while the team gets on with back orders.
“The fact that I could drag in, say, five big orders into the folder at any one time… let it do its thing whilst I can then do other elements at the same time. That is good. That's a big time saver and a bit of a game changer on how we used to work before.”
Messy emails, often read correctly
Quantities, part numbers and reference numbers jumbled together in an email body, including a purchase order reference picked out of a messy block of text.
“I've often thought, I'll be honest with you, [lowki.ai] is not going to cope with this one, but often it has. So it's proved me wrong one or two times.”
A new trade portal, tested first
PECO tested with the portal's CSV and PDF orders before launch, and added ship-to details to the portal's PDF output. Two attachments on one email no longer cause a problem.
“You can just drop the e-mail straight in and the fact that there's two attachments doesn't affect it, as we would have found that to be a problem in the early days.”
Order entry at head office
Sales reps used to enter their own orders. Head office now does, which gives reps more time on the road and with customers.
“Our sales reps used to put on their own orders but our head office now put them on… That's a huge amount of savings [in time] and gives our sales reps more time on the road and talking to our customers.”
Very little IT upkeep
Nothing for PECO's IT department to look after, and very little work to integrate it in the first place.
“There's not really anything that our IT department have to do for [lowki.ai]. So I think that's another bonus as well… we didn't have a huge amount to do with the integrating or the upkeep of [it]. It's been very minimal. And I think that's a really good thing for potential customers.”
In their words
An assistant, not a replacement
Order entry that used to need help from finance in busy periods no longer does.
The finance team were already trying to fit order entry around their existing workload, with very little spare capacity. AI has not replaced staff; it has enabled us to achieve more with the people we have.
“It's an assistant. It's a tool to help you do your job. It's not doing it 100% at all… it's an aid to do your job more efficiently.”
“You couldn't manually put on an order while you're in a meeting, whereas with [lowki.ai], you just move it in there and it's doing its thing. So when you come out your meeting, you can do the next bit.”
Honest limits
Where it still needs a person
- It can't tell trade packs from single-unit quantities when a customer's order format doesn't make that clear, so the team checks quantities on the sales order in Kinetic.
- It couldn't process one customer's Excel order, created in software PECO hadn't come across before. The exact cause wasn't identified.
- Other recognition errors are rare and are treated as routine tuning. PECO has improved recognition by adding cross-reference numbers for part numbers that customers enter in outdated formats.
PECO's team also looks over each order before it goes for picking, and wants it that way.
“A bit of OCD would creep in there. I want to have that human element. I wouldn't be happy at all with just not checking or letting it do its thing… I like to actually see things before it goes down for picking, so at least I know in my own mind that it's correct, hopefully before it gets to other people.”
“You would always want that element of just having a quick scan down through, making sure it's all correct, because also your customers aren't always going to get it right… you want to make sure that you're giving your customers the best customer service you can.”
We recommend the same approach to every customer: a hold in your own Kinetic work process so every order is reviewed first. lowki.ai works with your process and doesn't change it.
Verdict
Would they recommend it?
“From my own experiences, then yes, very much so. For that sheer time-saving convenience and reliability.”
“Absolutely. I would highly recommend it to other businesses.”
“It's helped with the efficiencies in our sales department, which has been the main focus of the last year, making sure sales are more streamlined, and [lowki.ai] has definitely helped do that.”
Drawn from a recorded feedback session with PECO on 21 September 2026, with figures confirmed by Kat Mitchell on 2 November 2026.
See what it reads from your orders
Send us a few real orders and we'll show you exactly what lowki.ai reads from them. Then see the full flow into Kinetic in a live demo.
Further reading
Sales order entry
How lowki.ai reads emailed orders and PDFs and creates the order in Kinetic.
Why we work inside Kinetic
Your rules, screens and approvals stay in Kinetic. Nothing is duplicated outside the ERP.
About lowki.ai
Built inside a manufacturer on Epicor Kinetic, and offered to others because it worked.
