I am trying to find a way to automate some Sales orders from one of our suppliers.
I would like to download PDF from their SupplyNet portal that has all their orders in it > Parse the info from the PDF to an excel file or something > API or DMT info into Epicor to mass make sales orders.
My company is cheap so they do not want to pay for ECM, could this be done with Power Automate and has anyone else done this that could give me some pointers.
Is PDF the only format they offer?
Unfortunately for now, yes.
pdf can be parsed with many libraries, but the pdf must have some parsable fields unless you want to ocr.
Also this, which isn’t that expensive (about $0.01/page)
Played with that a bit in PowerAutomate AI builder got far enough to POC then went down a QRCode sticker rabbit hole and never reemerged. one of the many side-projects pending.
AI-powered OCR is next level. We have ECM (not using it) an opted for TRAILD AP automation instead of ECM OCR add-on. Self-learning, very high accuracy, volume-based pricing, was no brainer.
You can probably setup an Epicor function to retrieve the data from the SupplyNet portal, as they most likely have some sort of API you get hit. This might also let you retrieve the data not in a pdf format.
If you are absolutely stuck with the PDF format, the most difficult part of this whole thing is parsing that as they can be very finicky depending on how the pdf is setup.
Once you have the pdf parsing resolved, its a simple thing to either setup a outside process to use Epicor’s API to create a sales order which is easier if you are familiar with coding outside of Epicor, or you can create a function in Epicor that does the order creation and either call that via api, or if you are also fetching the data and parsing it in an Epicor function, you can just call it directly from there. Then you can set it up on schedule and have it run automatically, unless SupplyNet provides a webhook, which that would be the preferred method. Im just not familiar with SupplyNet so I cant tell you if they do.
Also, @deepak knows of some Python library, which is what Kevin is probably referring to.
I don’t have a clue what I’m referring to!
I do know, that in the past, I have done it.
As to what I used, I’ve slept since then.
Was that you or @amurdock who did that qr sticker thing?
Do you still push the invoice into ECM or you just not using it at all?
I have done a QR thing before, will show it again this year as well, but will allude to a workflow that we have now that did what @josecgomez and @Banderson were doing where they were trying to get more than just one content type into ECM.
not at all. Everything else is in SPO why buy a new ECM? I was saying then - and now.
Fair
Yea, think the route I will take on this is Power Automate > AI builder to parse PDF > Parsed Info into Excel > then DMT the sales order in.
Sounds doable, but I am a beginner system admin with novice programing skills so learning this will be a blast.
@jallensignum I have tested a similar workflow to automate a few things including SOs. My workflow was roughly as follows: Web-based dashboard for users to drag-and-drop PDF/Excel based SOs > dashboard parses via API call to AI model > a PowerShell script that acts as a listener and operates the DMT tool.
I sometimes bypass the need for the DMT tool through API, but I have struggled to set certain tasks up outside of DMT.