I am looking for some insight on having Kinetic communicate directly with our customers SAP purchase ordering system for order entry. I’m mainly targeting this for our company to be able to drop in -or- upload orders from SAP (downloaded PDF into Epicor?) that have Multiple Ship To Locations - (50-100 ship to locations/order which need to be entered as releases in Kinetic)
We could potentially use it for all orders through SAP if it works but these are the orders that take hours to enter that I want to target for us.
I have done something similar, but it’s been years now and was on Prophet 21 when I did it. Any insight would be appreciated to cut down on the immense amount of time it takes our order entry person to key all this manually each time orders like this come up.
Also, on a different note we’d like to be able to print all the shipping paperwork related to these orders in a batch for packing slips - I am curious to see if anyone has any experience with that as well.
You’re receiving these as PDF? If so, you’re going to need some very capable OCR (PDF Reading Software). If you can get it into Excel (or better yet, CSV), it would be relatively easy to set this up with DMT, or an Epicor Functions.
We’ve had success with this using MS Power Automate, which reads customer PO’s and creates a sales order in Epicor.
We use a combination of a PA Flow, a custom PA ‘AI Model’ which is just extracting text from documents but trained on our customer paperwork, and a PA gateway. It creates the order directly via api rather than uploading files or DMT or anything manual. We then just have our team manually glance over it and tick ready to process if they’re happy with it.
We’re in ‘live testing’ mode still, but we’ve proven it works and its very flexible; for example it manages customers product codes, it recognises our product codes when customers don’t get them quite right, and picks up delivery charges from multiple locations on the PDF. Its also easy to add automated error alerts and logging for when it can’t recognise something. We mostly only have one ship to per order but if its logical then no reason why it couldn’t be done.
If your customer PO PDF’s are consistent and legible then it should be doable, but you’ll save a lot of time if you have developer who’s familiar with Power Automate. (or in our case we had a dev familiar with PA and Epicor, which was better still).
Thank you, Barry - this is very interesting to hear.
Our customer PO’s are VERY consistent in format and layout so this could be a good option for us in the future.
So, the software looks directly at a PDF order then? For instance we would download it from SAP (their portal) that’s the start of the process, correct?
What kind of pricing does this entail? Per page cost - per order - per line item?
Thank you, Barry - this is very interesting to hear.
Our customer PO’s are VERY consistent in format and layout so this could be a good option for us in the future.
So, the software looks directly at a PDF order then? For instance we would download it from SAP (their portal) that’s the start of the process, correct?
What kind of pricing does this entail? Per page cost - per order - per line item?
How about when there are change orders does it just become a manual process again at that point or how does the software work with those? Obviously, we’d need to note the changes every time in the customer portal, but it would drop in the orders to Epicor still I would assume, correct? We’d just wait to have have them approved and then push them through manually?
Correct, the software is reading the PDF directly. We receive multiple orders from multiple customers with different systems and they mostly send as PDF, its not really an option for us to get them to format their orders to suit us.
Downloading the PDF from their portal sounds like the starting point for you in this instance (unless they send it or put in a shared location that Power Automate can access), then you could just drop it into a SharePoint document library for the flow to pick up. There’s multiple options, its what works best for you.
Our pricing is per line item. The Flow checks the price on their PO matches what we have saved against their price list, and sends an error if it doesn’t match, so we can check manually.
Just noticing your other comments:
Change orders (assume you mean the customer changes the original order?) - as long as the system can recognise its a change order (i.e. the customers PO number is the same, or is a ‘-1’ or something) you could set the Flow to recognise this as an amend rather than creating a new.
If there is an option to download as a csv then @kve’s suggestion is probably an easier starting point. We have a lot of small orders with just a few lines so converting a csv to the correct format and uploading via DMT doesn’t save us much time. But if you have large orders with multiple shipto’s, lines and releases then DMT could be a good time saver whilst using standard functionality.
Just realised by pricing you probably mean what we pay, not our product pricing
Its Microsoft Power Platform licensing which I really don’t understand, hopefully someone else can help you.
I think you need a Power Automate Premium licence (minimum) to build the flow, and then you need AI Builder service credits. A certain amount come free with PA, but for a large order you’ll use a lot of credits, so will probably need to buy more.
Well I grabbed a csv file for the order I’m looking at and there is no mention in the csv file of all the 62 different ship to locations so that doesn’t really help me much…?
They all just say “multiple locations”
Not sure that helps for a csv upload without all the data we need.
By change orders I mean their order has a wrong price or box qty and we have to reject the order in their portal and wait for a “change order” to come after that. The rejection part will always be manual which is annoying enough but part of doing business.
We can enter it in Epicor for what it should be but we’re waiting for that change order for final approval to release to manufacturing.
Power Automate runs on top of Azure Logic Apps, which can run on a Managed Service Account where PA runs under the user who created the flow and if that account is disabled…well, you know. Logic Apps has a much easier to understand pricing scheme. Logic Apps can monitor email boxes, sftp locations, etc.
Hello Scott. Looking for a clarification here. You’ve been stating “SAP purchase ordering system”, but I’m wondering if your customer is actually running SAP ERP or if you are really referring to their use of SAP’s Ariba Business Network system. If the latter, you may want to take a look at another topic, Anyone integrating E10/Kinetic with SAP Ariba?, too. I learned last August that that Automation Studio has a pre-built connector for SAP Ariba, but at that time, no recipe existed yet. I don’t know if that has changed.
This is exactly what I’m talking about. Sorry for the confusion.
SAP’s Ariba Business Network system
“I learned last August that that Automation Studio has a pre-built connector for SAP Ariba, but at that time, no recipe existed yet. I don’t know if that has changed.”
This is what I was trying to get it. I’ll check this topic out - thank you!
.