Every day, customer service teams at label converters and packaging printers open their inboxes to face a familiar problem: emails with orders, arriving in a variety of formats including plain text, PDF attachments, Excel sheets, or a scanned form. Each one must be read, interpreted, matched with data from the MIS and reworked into the company’s business system before the order gets acknowledged, and production can begin. This takes valuable time away from customer service teams.
CERM, a global provider of Management Information System (MIS) software for label, flexible packaging, and folding carton converters, is officially launching Lexis, a cloud-based AI agent, built to automate one of the industry’s most time-consuming administrative tasks: converting customer order emails into validated CERM sales orders. Lexis reads incoming order emails and their attachments, identifies the customer and the order details, matches the content of the email in real time with MIS data, and prepares the information as a sales order in CERM, making it ready for a staff member to review and confirm it.
CERM introduced Lexis to its customers during the CERM User Group Day 2026 in Paris and Dallas and has since gone live with 20 customers. The company is now launching it publicly at LOUPE Americas 2026, taking place September 15-17 at the Donald E. Stephens Convention Center in Rosemont, Illinois.
How it Works
Lexis extracts the full content of the email and any attachments and transforms it into structured business data.
Lexis is the first agent working with live business data for this specific use case. Using a real-time API connection to the CERM database, Lexis suggests the most likely customer record. If the sender’s email address matches a single customer, Lexis confirms it automatically; if there are several possible matches, a staff member picks the right one. Lexis then pulls out the purchase order number, products, quantities, and delivery information from the email and attaches a confidence score to what it has found.
Lexis not only supports this simple order creation flow but is a real customer service support agent that validates prices, creates new products, manages the artwork attached to the emails, creates new delivery addresses in the MIS, validates PO numbers, and performs other work. All of this was traditionally done manually by a customer service representative.
A CERM user is required to review and confirm the data before the sales order is created. Nothing is entered into CERM without a person signing off on it. If a company chooses to, Lexis can also send the order acknowledgement back to the customer automatically once the order has been entered.
Using a rule-based model, CERM customers can also customize the behavior of Lexis based on customer specifications and preferences. For instance, rules can account for a specific customer’s typical order format, communications patterns, or additional requirements that need to be incorporated for a particular customer.
“Manually copying order details out of an email and into a business system is exactly the kind of repetitive work that leads to mistakes, especially when volumes are high and orders are complex,“ said Michael Nankervis, Managing Director at Onpack, an early adopter of Lexis. “Lexis isn’t designed to replace customer service teams. It removes repetitive administrative work so they can focus on customers instead of data entry.”
Already Handling Thousands of Orders
Onpack has been using Lexis since its early rollout, and it has already processed 260 orders through the platform, covering more than 3,500 products, from simple reorders to complex, multi-line jobs. Today, 80% of that company’s business goes through Lexis.
“For our larger orders, what used to take two to three hours to key in by hand now takes under an hour with Lexis,” said Michael Nankervis, Managing Director at Onpack. “Manual entry also means constantly double-checking your own work. That risk of human error just isn’t part of the process anymore.”
According to CERM, Lexis is the first step of a broader effort to automate email-based workflows across the ordering process. Other capabilities are already under development, including RFQ and ASN email processing, and the option of using live inventory data to understand what is already available when taking incoming orders.
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