Purchase orders are received as PDFs in email attachments, and the user has to keep track of all of them using excel sheets, which becomes difficult if you have a high volume of them coming in every other day.Some of the issues may be
- You might miss some emails one day and miss those purchase orders completely until the client calls you to ask for the update!
- You physically have to input each purchase order in the excel sheet and let's be honest, it's not going to be very intuitive.
- The information about the number of items supplied is not available instantly, you have to go through the sheet each time and compute that information every time!
The problem was solved by automating the process of tracking purchase orders
- An application was created that polls user's email every 2 hours and look for emails from specific vendors. If any relevant emails are found, it checks if it has any attached purchase order pdfs.
- If any pdfs are found, it parses that pdf and saves relevant purchase order data to a database, along with the receiver email.
- This system lets you track the progress of each item in the purchase order and the quantity you have supplied by uploading invoices that you have submitted to the client so that everything is in one place and it's all connected!
- It also lets you search for any item by its unique field called material number and shows all the purchase orders that particular item is included in