Orders arrive in every format
Emails, PDFs, spreadsheets, portal exports and the occasional fax. Someone re-keys all of them into the ERP, and every re-key is a chance to get a part number wrong.
Extraction with validation against your product master is the highest-value integration in most of these businesses.
Validation against your master data
- Part numbers matched to the catalogue, including customer-specific codes
- Quantities checked against pack sizes and minimum orders
- Prices checked against the customer's agreed terms
- Delivery addresses matched to known sites
- Duplicate order detection against recent history
Customer-specific part numbering is where manual keying fails most often, and it is exactly what a system with your mapping table gets right every time.
Supplier documents in the other direction
Order confirmations, advance shipping notices and delivery notes carry dates and quantities that differ from what you ordered. Those differences matter and nobody has time to check them all.
Automatic comparison, with only the discrepancies surfaced, catches short shipments and date slips before they become customer problems.
Quality and returns notes
Free-text notes about defects, returns and complaints contain patterns nobody aggregates. Classified consistently, they show which supplier, which line and which process is causing what.
It is one of the easiest analytical wins available, because the data already exists and is currently unreadable at scale.
Be honest about predictive work
| Application | Requirement | Realistic? |
|---|---|---|
| Order and document processing | Documents | Yes, now |
| Discrepancy detection | Order and confirmation data | Yes, now |
| Quality pattern analysis | Two years of notes | Usually |
| Demand forecasting | Three years, stable patterns | Sometimes |
| Predictive maintenance | Sensor data at scale | Rarely, at mid-size |