Dominion Salt
INDUSTRY:
Manufacturing
COUNTRY:
New Zealand
ERP:
NetSuite
Solution
Sales Order Automation
Background
Dominion Salt is a New Zealand salt manufacturer and part of the Cheetham Salt group, supplying a broad base of B2B customers across food manufacturing, distribution and retail.
The business operates on a wholesale/distribution model, receiving a high and steady volume of customer purchase orders every month across several ordering channels. Order processing sits with a shared services team of two to three people, led by Customer Service and Shared Services Team, Jacqui Johnstone.
In 2024, Dominion Salt began replacing its existing ERP with NetSuite, delivered by implementation partner Annexa. SmartUi was engaged by Dominion Salt (via Annexa) for Sales order automation as part of the NetSuite programme.
The challenge
Unstructured customer orders
Dominion Salt was receiving customer orders through multiple, disconnected channels: a web ordering portal and PDF/email-based orders, with no integration into the company’s AR system. Every order had to be manually re-keyed into the ERP.
The incumbent order-capture tooling could only process documents on a rigid, structured format. In practice, real customer orders often came in the customer’s own layout, using each customer’s own part numbers and units of measure. Anything outside a fixed template simply couldn’t be processed automatically.
Large volumes, small team
Dominion Salt processed roughly 1400 orders a month, but peaking at 2500 per month in peak season. The team handling this was small: 2-3 people with capacity thin and concentrated.
Revenue & service reputation risk
Sales orders sit on the customer-facing side of the business. Errors and delays here are felt directly by customers – wrong quantities, wrong delivery address, duplicated or missed orders. These all come with revenue and service-reputation risk, not just back-office admin.
Duplication
Duplication was common, because customers frequently sent the same order twice, meaning the staff sometimes keyed the same order twice.
Mismatched data
Customer data never matched Dominion’s internal data: customer ordered using their own SKUs and units of measure (e.g. tonnes vs. kilograms), and every mismatch required a judgement call.
Pushing the problem back onto customers wasn’t realistic – Dominion Salt couldn’t easily persuade large customers to change how they order.
"We used to spend our mornings just typing orders in, line by line, and hoping we hadn't missed a duplicate.
Now the team opens SmartUi, checks what's already been pulled through, and moves on.
We're reviewing instead of re-keying, and that's freed us up to actually look at what's going on with an order, not just get it into the system”
Jacqui Johnstonen
Customer Service Team Leader,
Dominion Salt
The consequence of doing nothing
- Go live on brand new NetSuite and still manually keying 1400 orders a month from unstructured documents.
- Duplicate orders that would have kept flowing through to fulfilment, adding cost of duplicate shipments, credits, and customer complaints.
- Incorrect order data ex. wrong SKUs, units of measure or delivery address, would have been posted straight to Netsuite, causing corrupt costing, pricing and reporting from day one.
- A manual model threat could only scale by adding headcount.
The implementation
Over competitors, SmartUi’s capability had been proven, against Dominion’s hardest real documents, where two external vendors had already failed the same test.
SmartUi started the implementation of automating inbound customer orders for Dominion Salt and creating the resulting sales orders directly in NetSuite.
SmartUi in daily use
Each morning, Jacqui Johnstone’s team forwards the batch of purchase orders it has received into SmartUi. Staff log into SmartUi’s verification station, review the extracted line items for accuracy, and push the batch through -which creates the corresponding sales orders in NetSuite and triggers the fulfilment process.
What used to be a manual keying exercise across the day is now a single, reviewed batch each morning. SmartUI:
- Ingest orders from multiple channels and formats – PDFs, spreadsheets/CSV and email – without requiring a fixed template.
- Extract order data and creates the sales order in NetSuite automatically.
- Detects duplicate purchase orders before they reach fulfilment.
- Translates customer SKUs to Dominion Salts internal SKUs by reading NetSuite’s own customer item reference data – no separate master data set for Dominion Salt to maintain. NetSuite stays the single source of truth.
- Normalises units of measure, including customer-specific packing sizes, for example, recognising that “a box” means 20kg for one customer and 30kg for another, and flags mismatches to the operator instead of silently posting the wrong quantity.
- Defaults the delivery address/ship to rather than searching for and re-verifying in on every order, which reduced handling time per order.
- Supports bulk or aggregated orders, with downstream separation handled in NetSuite.
70% of orders processed in <1min.
Less errors
Better customer service
The results
Faster processing
More than 70% of orders are processed in less than a minute.
STP headroom
SmartUi currently supports 40% straight through processing (STP) capability, but Dominion Salt has made a deliberate choice to keep STP switched off. The business wants a person to review every order before it posts. This is a documented business choice, not a system limitation, and represents proven automation headroom Dominion can turn on whenever it chooses.
Less errors
Duplicate orders, customer-SKU mismatches and unit-of-measure errors are now caught by the system at the point of entry, rather than by an operator’s eye or an after-the-fact exception report.
From data entry to review
The clearest shift is in how the team works, not just how fast it works. Staff have moved from data entry to review. Rather than typing each order in line by line, they check a system-extracted order for accuracy before it posts.
