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SALES ORDER ENTRY
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A fifty-year-old family run wholesale company with operational responsibility for some of the worlds leading brands has prided itself on delivering an exceptionally efficient service.
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The organisation receives hundreds of new sales orders every day from just a handful of its top customers.
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Receiving and manually entering customer purchase orders can be a mundane and time-consuming task which is also prone to human error and costly mistakes.
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The operations director wanted to find an automated solution to this problem and reclaim valuable staff time for other purposes.
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A system was put in place which monitors a mailbox for new customer purchase orders. On receipt, key data from the order is extracted. This includes basic information such as order number, delivery address and contact details along with the required products and quantities.
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The extracted data is then sent to the line of business system which immediately displays the new order.
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There are rare cases where order details are missing or incorrect, but business validation rules are configured to detect such instances.
When a rule is triggered the administration team receive an email notification. A member of the team can then access the PRISM Reviewer interface to easily correct or add detail or cancel and query the order with the customer.
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The whole system was implemented in just a matter of days. Then, after a short testing period the company went live and started experiencing the following benefits:
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All manual data entry is eliminated saving hours of staff time
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Order entry takes seconds removing any delay in the process
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Significantly higher accuracy improves customer service
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No increase in human resources required as order volumes grow
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SOFTWARE DEPLOYED
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PRISM Capture
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PRISM WorkPath Server
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PRISM WorkPath Desktop (Reviewer Interface)
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Altman IM digital workflows are always customised to suit the way your organisation works. The various stages required and sequence vary from customer to customer. The outline below details the flow deployed in this particular project.
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PROCESS STEPS
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1. Input
The process is triggered each time a customer purchase order is sent to a generic email mailbox that the workflow process is watching. Each time an email is received the attachment(s) are stripped and sent for processing.
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2. Recognition
​PRISM Capture will initially recognise which customer the attachment is for – although sending email address would normally be the easiest method in this case orders for different trading companies are sent from the same sending address. Instead data unique to the company is identified from the document e.g. phone number, VAT number, company number.
The configuration allows for emails sent in error to the customer order mailbox i.e. with attachments which are not purchase orders. In this case an ‘unknown’ attachment will be automatically emailed to another generic mailbox with a notification message for the administration team to process.
3. Data Extraction
Now that the document is associated with a customer the correct data extraction template is applied. Using intelligent SMART zones which allow for movement of data on the page from one document to the next the following data is then extracted:
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Order Number
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Order Date
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Delivery Name
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Delivery Address
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Mobile Number
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Country name
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Product Table Line Items (multiple pages)
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Product Number
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Quantity
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​All fields have validation rules configured to determine whether automatic processing should take place. If it fails a validation rule the document and data is sent for review (Step Three).
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3. Data Review
In situations where mandatory data is missing or incorrect the administration will receive an email alert. One of the team will then use the PRISM Reviewer interface to check and correct the data before committing it to the next stage in the process.
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​4. Outputs: Line of Business Application and Network Folders
The extracted data along with other data for each supplier e.g. customer account number is output to an XML data file to a specific network folder.
The line of business application has an import routine capability which watches the network folder and checks every few seconds for new XML files.
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The import routine reads the data in the XML file automatically creating a new customer order in the application ready for the next stage in the order fulfilment process.
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The physical customer order PDF is named and saved as a text-searchable PDF in a logical local network folder structure. New folders are created automatically when required so that documents can easily be retrieved when required.
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