Usually two to six hours a week for each person who does it, and it sits on top of an order module that was bought to remove it. It is the commonest live layer in a South African mid-sized business, and the one most often mistaken for a staffing problem.
Last reviewed 30 September 2026
At the surface, live since the day the ERP went in. A customer emails a purchase order, sometimes as a PDF, sometimes as a photo of a printed page, and someone types it into Sage, Syspro or SAP Business One line by line. The layer is dated to whenever the last attempt to change it was abandoned, not to when it started.
An order module that can import, a customer portal nobody logs into, and often an EDI project that was scoped and never signed off. Each one is dormant or dead, still licensed, still in place. The re-keying persists because every one of those layers asked the customer to change, and the customer didn't.
Plain automation for the structured part: reading the order, matching the customer and the product codes, creating the sales order and flagging anything that doesn't match. AI earns its place only where the emails are unstructured, such as a photo of a handwritten order, and even then it drafts and a person confirms.
Observed and timed: we sit with the person who does it and count orders an hour. Then we check the ERP's order log for the same week, and the lower figure wins. A range, never a point, until the Index has measured the sector. How EMBR measures. This layer is one part of workaround debt; The Transect measures all of them together.
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