The half past eight email has an order typed by hand into the body of the message, the next one has a PDF with the customer's logo, another has an Excel file with the columns moved since last month, and all three have to be keyed into the business software before the delivery run leaves
Before anything else, the codes
The supplier calls the item one thing, you call it another, the customer may well order it under a third name, and in the middle there's a person doing the translating, from memory or by opening a file only she knows
This is where the most time goes and where the most mistakes are born, and it's also the part that is easiest to put right, because translating a code is a rule, not a judgment
You start from a conversion table, the supplier's code on one side, yours on the other, with the variants and the duplicates you've been carrying for years, and from there on the machine does the translating, always the same way, on Friday at seven in the evening too
When a code turns up that isn't in the table, the system doesn't try to guess, it sets it aside and shows it to you, you decide once and the table learns that line
The price that moves more than it should
A new price list arrives in a format that is never the one before, and inside there's always some line that doesn't add up, a 1,20 turned into 12,00 because a comma went missing, or a price that doubles with nobody having warned you
If that line goes through it doesn't end there, it comes back to you, first as goods shipped at the wrong price, then as a credit note to be raised by hand while the customer is on the phone
That's what the variance check is for, you set the threshold, say ten per cent up or down against the price you have now, and anything past it doesn't go in, it stays on a list you go through before you put the price list live, instead of finding out once the invoice is out
What it can do between the email and the delivery note
These are examples of what the system is able to do, not jobs already delivered to some wholesaler, the business started recently and I'd rather say it plainly
- It reads the orders that come in by email, whether they're PDFs, Excel files or text typed into the message, pulls out code, quantity and delivery address, and enters the lines into the business software you already use, whether it's in the family of Danea Easyfatt, Passepartout Mexal, Arca or TeamSystem, opening the screens the way you would
- It translates the supplier's codes into yours with the conversion table, and holds back the ones it doesn't recognize
- It loads the new price list, even when the file changes shape every time, and stops the lines that move past your threshold
- It checks the stock levels and prepares the reorder proposal with the rules you give it, minimum stock, supplier lead times, the seasonality only you know
- It downloads the orders from the customer's portal and brings them in along with all the others
The method works just as well on programs that have no direct integration to offer, no API, no file layout, and in that case the system works on the screens, as explained on the page about programs with no integrations
What stays in your hands
The trade your customers pay you for isn't keying in line items, it's knowing what to keep in the warehouse and what not to, how hard to push the supplier on the big end of month order, and who you can promise tomorrow's delivery to without regretting it
The exceptions stay yours, a code never seen before, a price past the threshold, an order with an odd quantity, the system stops and hands them to you, instead of carrying on and letting you find the damage on the delivery note
Why it pays off on your numbers
The truth of this trade is that volume is high and margin per line is low, so the cost that really counts is the time per line, and the minutes you spend today translating codes and retyping orders come out of exactly that, the margin
I'm not going to throw a savings figure at you, you put your own numbers into the calculation page, and you see what it already costs you today
I'm Antonio Fuccillo, I write the automation myself and I answer the messages myself, you show me how you work now, a screen recording is fine, I tell you whether it can be done and I tell you the monthly fee before we start, that figure stays and you approve every addition yourself, we can talk it through from the contact page or on WhatsApp at 352 012 5997
The program names mentioned on this page are trademarks of their respective owners, we name them only to make clear what kind of programs we mean, we have no relationship with the companies that make them and we don't sell their licenses