As far as the workflows, they will always have some form of customization to the sales order to work like your existing E10/Kinetic Order entry.
I would say it depends on the form you get from the customer how much you can rely on it to give accurate data capture, IDC does well with a structured form and high dpi data.
If the customer does not send a quality form or an excel spreadsheet then IDC won’t work with those. if the customer expects a quick order process, I would check with them on what they will provide. Then you can pick your solution.
@Engineer88 I was looking at your situation in 2009 when our bookkeeper wanted to get AP automation for his needs and I took a look at us replacing APM with ECM and found a toolset that I could do a ton with. In 2022 we did an SOA implementation and it was quick to get up and running. I also did an inhouse EDI with one partner at the same time. ftp drop so there are no EDI charges for either of us.
We currently scan and index all of our packing slips and Mfg. C of Cs 90% auto and recently got the barcode module to get that to 100% auto. I have a dashboard that for first articles takes all of the issued lots of material and finds all of the related packing slips and MCofCs so a complete lot tracked First Article report can be prepared for our customers.
We scan in tariff invoices and I use the same kind of lookup to find all of the related receipts and invoices for an audit trail of tariffs charged to a customer with the source document linked in a dashboard.
We currently link all of our job travelers to shipments manually and I am planning an ECM workflow to automate that process.
Appreciate the feedback. Once I see the cost, I’ll see if its even worth pursuing. If we go the whole sales order automation, wouldn’t add anything anyway.
Epicor says the OCR is 85% accurate. Sadly they have no way of spinning up a test ECM for us throw throw a batch of PDFs into to get first hand experience. Basically all of our customers are providing computer generated pdf orders, so I suspect the bulk of the work would be in some type of mapping.
We have AP automation but that 85% is highly dependent on the source. As mentioned by @swilliasc111, a high DPI document from your customer will have a higher rate than 85%. Another thing we’ve found with our AP automation is some of our suppliers have fields very close together making OCR is bit harder.
Check out Conexiom. Much cheaper than ECM. Essentially just converts inbound PDF or text PO’s to inbound EDI so your team doesn’t have to do it manually. I believe they also offer AP automation that works in a similar way. Very user friendly.
Well Greg you beat me to the finish line and that’s where it counts. I have been meaning to try and rally my teams to stop doing physical record keeping and let me throw barcodes on all those docs and scan them in! At some point would love to get rid of paper if it makes sense process wise.
…that you were implementing Conexiom back in November 2022. Based on your post here, sounds now like that you’re pretty happy with the solution! How long did it take to implement? How well does it integrate with Kinetic? Does it require any other software for integration? Did it require any changes by your customers?
@frontierits
Following along with my previous post, wondering if your client ultimately implemented Conexiom, and if so, how well it’s working for them. Can you share anything regarding the outcome?
We’ve learned from our consultant (and proven in field) that having a modern scanner works wonders, and one which can be adjusted to automatically remove background colors. Ensuring the scanner does not do OCR itself was also important - allowing IDC to do that instead of using the potentially poor OCR metadata from another source helps.
It can definitely be worth it. The complexity of your processes will determine the time to implement and how much customization you require.
Also, whoever you decide to work with on implementation will determine the success.
Me getting the BarCode module was from seeing your Insights presentation.