How To-Øl reduced sales order admin by 90% with Turis

Half a day. That’s what a sales rep at To-Øl was losing — every day — to the inbox. The other half went to actually selling beer.

It is the quietest kind of operational drag, the kind that doesn’t show up on a dashboard. A retailer emails an order. The rep opens SAP. The rep keys in the order — products, quantities, the right pricing tier, the export-only SKUs that don’t appear in the front-of-house catalogue. The rep closes SAP. The rep emails the retailer back. Multiply by every order. Multiply by every rep. Now imagine doing that and still trying to be out at the customer.

This is a story about the half of the day a B2B sales team gets back when the order desk stops being the order desk.

Locked to the chair

For most of To-Øl’s growth years, the on-trade order desk worked the way most growing wholesale operations work: by hand. Coop, Dagrofa, Salling Group — the major Danish retail chains — sent orders by EDI when they could and by email or phone when they couldn’t. The bars, cafés, and hotels sent orders the way bars, cafés, and hotels do: an email at 11pm, a phone call between shifts, a message that started with hey, can you put me down for…

Each one landed on a rep. The rep keyed it into SAP Business One. The rep applied the right pricing for that account. The rep invoiced in the afternoon. The rep stayed at their desk through the cut-off because if they didn’t, the order missed the next morning’s pick. The natural rhythm of the job — being with customers — got squeezed into whatever time was left.

“I was selling to the customer, getting an email with the order, and punching it into SAP myself. On top of that I was invoicing every day. You were locked to your chair because you had to be there in case an order came in before the cut-off. You normally wouldn’t be out the door before 1pm.”

Kasper Noergaard, Sales Operations Specialist, To-Øl

Manual entry is also where errors compound. SAP carries To-Øl’s full catalogue, including the export-only SKUs that look almost — but not quite — like the domestic ones. A typo at order-entry becomes a wrong-SKU dispatch, becomes a credit note, becomes hours of stock reconciliation. The cost is felt twice: once when it happens, and again when the team has to unwind it.

Eric Gilham, the company’s Chief Digital Officer, put the math the way an operator does:

“From our perspective, if our sales reps are spending half their day just typing in orders, we are wasting their time.”

Eric Gilham, Chief Digital Officer, To-Øl

The push to change didn’t come from the executive floor. It came from the sales team — the people doing the typing.

Why not Shopify

To-Øl already run Shopify. The B2C storefront is mature and well-served by it. So when the moment came to find a platform for the wholesale channel, the conservative answer was sitting on the desk: extend the existing Shopify stack to Shopify Plus, add the B2B layer, keep everything under one vendor. The team explored it seriously.

What they found was a familiar B2B-on-D2C pattern. Shopify Plus could be made to work for the storefront mechanics. The catch was the rest of the iceberg: the codebase, the theme, the ongoing engineering required to keep a consumer platform behaving like a B2B one.

“With Shopify, you have overhead managing the codebase and the theme. With Turis, you focus on integration and functionality instead of layout and code.”

Eric Gilham

Then there was the part of B2B Shopify cannot reach. Danish wholesale operates inside a regulatory and commercial reality the platform was never built for: PANT — Denmark’s deposit-return scheme — has to be applied correctly per product, per customer, per channel. The major retail chains expect EDI: not the idea of EDI, the specific document specs of Coop and Dagrofa and Salling Group, mapped and live.

“Shopify from a corporate view knows what EDI is. But do they know what Coop, Dagrofa and Salling Group are? No. They don’t know who these people are.”

Eric Gilham

On Shopify, To-Øl would either build the missing pieces themselves, lean on a partner agency, or accept the gaps. Turis offered the third option: a platform that already had the pieces, run by a team that knew the territory.

“The big difference with Turis compared to Shopify is the localisation, a local partner, familiarity with SAP Business One, and the willingness to be a support partner in the whole process. We just couldn’t get that with Shopify.”

Eric Gilham

How the work actually moved

Jens Reimer, To-Øl’s Business Process Specialist, led the implementation. The architecture decision was made early: SAP Business One stays the system of record; Turis sits in front of it, capturing orders from every channel and pushing them in as structured data. No middleware, no parallel database, no second source of truth to keep in sync.

The rollout went in waves. The sales team came first — instead of keying their own orders into SAP, they placed them through Turis. The instant benefit was less typing for the same orders. Then customer onboarding started: on-trade accounts logged into a branded portal, browsed their own catalogue at their own prices, and placed their own orders.

“In the beginning we used Turis ourselves, putting in orders, which made things a lot easier. Then we slowly onboarded customers as buyers. Now I’d say 90 per cent of orders are placed by the customer directly via our storefront.”

Kasper Noergaard

The remaining sliver — the orders that never come through a storefront — comes from the major retail chains. For those that require EDI, Turis sets up the connection and structures the orders automatically. The team had looked at standalone EDI providers before. The pricing made the decision harder than it should have been.

“EDI is outdated and confusing, but in some cases it’s required. You can try to solve it yourself, but Turis made it look easy. It’s plug and play, essentially. We explored a lot of EDI options. They were expensive with huge upfront costs. Turis can handle it in a way that makes it much easier for us, without the same costs. That made the decision simple.”

Jens Reimer, Business Process Specialist, To-Øl

That long tail — the PDF and Excel orders that arrive by email — gets handled by Turis Vision, which reads them, structures them, validates them against live SAP data, and pushes them through. The Danish-specific layer that the global platforms don’t touch (PANT, in particular) sits underneath all of it, applying the right charge to the right product for the right customer regardless of which front door the order came in through.

“Now, most orders we don’t see. They go into the system, get to the customer, and get invoiced — and we don’t have to do anything. With Turis in place, we’re dealing with a tiny fraction of the orders manually compared to before, while order volume itself keeps growing.”

Jens Reimer

What the team got back

The headline number is twenty hours. Each rep, each week, returned to the work that pays them — being out with the customer.

The lived experience is something else. On the customer side, the storefront killed the small, constant friction of figuring out whether a SKU was in stock. The retailer’s standard pre-order ritual — the two-or-three-email back-and-forth before a single line of an order was confirmed — went away. Customers logged in, saw their catalogue at their prices, set their favourites, and placed orders in seconds.

The on-trade accounts that order at 11pm tell the cleanest version of the story. Those orders used to sit in the inbox overnight, untouched until a rep arrived at 7am and started typing them into SAP. The warehouse waited.

“When the warehouse team meet at 7am, they can start packing straight away because the orders have already passed through Turis into the system. They don’t need to wait another two to three hours for our sales team to enter them.”

Kasper Noergaard

And on the retail side, EDI moved from a known liability to a routine capability. Some retailers charge suppliers who can’t transact electronically; To-Øl had been absorbing those charges, or processing the orders manually to avoid them. Both options were costs paid for not having the right tooling.

“Financially, EDI is a requirement with some retailers. It costs money not to have it. With Turis we now have that covered — and on top of that, the EDI capabilities make ordering much more precise. I can’t make typing errors anymore when orders come in, and it makes us look a lot more professional.”

Jens Reimer

Errors, across the board, dropped to near zero. Not because the team got better at typing; because the team mostly stopped typing.

Growth, off the headcount line

The clearest read on what Turis has meant for To-Øl is the relationship between two curves. Order volume keeps climbing. The team handling it has not. The compounding work that used to scale linearly with retailer count — the entry, the validation, the reconciliation — now scales with the platform instead.

“Turis has been instrumental to our ability to grow without adding headcount. Sales is a relationship game — our reps need to be out there, not wasting their time on data entry. I’d say we’ve saved on administration to the capacity of at least one full-time sales role. This isn’t about reducing staff; it’s about using automation to detach growth from headcount.”

Eric Gilham, Chief Digital Officer, To-Øl

That phrase — detach growth from headcount — is the cleanest articulation of what a well-fitted B2B platform is supposed to do. The job is to take the routine, structured, volume-sensitive parts of the order flow off the team’s plate so the team can spend their time on the parts of the job that compound: the customer conversation, the next range expansion, the relationship.

For To-Øl that has meant a sales operation that grew without adding the typical operational tax. A warehouse that starts work at 7am instead of 9. A retailer experience that fits how retailers actually want to buy. And a sales team that, finally, makes it out of the office before 1pm.

“If I had to recommend Turis to someone else, I’d say the relationship is unique. They are extremely knowledgeable and work closely with you throughout the whole process. That’s the biggest selling point.”

Eric Gilham