supplier acknowledgements / week
700–800
SCEI operates in an industrial environment where purchasing information directly affects production planning. Every week, hundreds of supplier acknowledgements enter the purchasing process and have to be reconciled with orders already stored in the ERP.
Challenge
Each supplier acknowledgement had to be opened, read and compared manually against the corresponding ERP order. Teams checked quantities, prices and delivery dates, then entered or corrected the information by hand. At 700 to 800 documents every week, between one and three people could be mobilized depending on workload. A small entry error could then propagate into purchasing and production planning.
Solution
• Extract data automatically from supplier emails and PDF acknowledgements.
• Compare quantity, price and delivery information against the ERP.
• Validate the acknowledgement automatically when the information matches.
• Trigger an alert and email when a discrepancy is detected.
• Provide a dedicated application for real-time monitoring.
Results
Manual ERP entry was removed from the process. Between one and three FTEs were freed from repetitive input work, delivery dates in the ERP became reliable in real time, and the human-entry errors and related delays previously associated with the workflow were removed.
