The Problem
Many businesses today frequently utilize email as an acceptable tool for facilitating routine business transactions. Email poses a number of organizational and process challenges when it comes to automating an order entry process. While email serves as a convenient "catch all" for receiving voluminous amounts of incoming transactions, such as purchase order requests, it can create on the receiving side of the order entry process -
chaos.
First, we can all agree on the surface the process appears to be very simple: 1) Set up an alias email address on your email server called, "orders@xyz.com. 2) Designate a CSR or somebody on your staff to monitor the incoming email address for orders. 3) Send an order acknowledge back to the customer indicating you have received their order. 4) Process the order like you would any other purchase order you have received via FAX, US Mail, Online, etc.
Unintended Consequences
You may have now come to find out while it all seemed rather easy, you have introduced an entirely new set of problems to deal with: 1) Some customers send a PO request as an attachment to their email which means you have to print out the email msg AND the email attachment so you have the complete record of the PO request. 2) Customers supply their email with an attachment such as a PDF while others choose to send you the raw file that they produced the PO request in (WORD, Excel, TIF, JPEG, etc.) 3) You now have all kinds of different flavors of attachments coming to your CSR who may not be familiar with how to open all the different formats, or he/she might not have the proper rendering software application on their desktop to open up the attachment. 4) You either now have come to realize you must develop some sort of electronic filing system for your incoming email messages and attachments so you maintain a historical bread crumb trail of the transactions or; elect to print out all your messages and attachments and revert back to a paper filing system (only later to prep, scan and index?).
What you have accomplished may all look good from the outside to your customers, but in reality your employees are frustrated with the way all this has panned out internally. Emails are piling up, if you are a seasonal business, this can become really problematic. There is no consistency in which customers create their email messages and attachments. Paper still exists in the process. Somebody internally on your staff needs to sort through the messages by sender to figure out which orders belong to which CSR and forward them on yet again, creating another manual step in the order entry process.
Automated Email Capture with CAPSYS CAPTURE
Automated email input for CAPSYS has never been easier with CAPSYS CAPTURE Email Gateway. CAPSYS CAPTURE Email Gateway QSX supports traditional email systems such as SMTP, MAPI and IMAP which support most of the major mail server configurations. All of the email message content and its associated attachments are automatically captured so we may utilize as much of the message content to facilitate and automated the document indexing process. Further, email messages and their associated attachments are routed to the correct CSR for order processing and are consistently managed and processed day after day. These features dramatically cut down on labor and costs typically associated with error prone, manual data entry processes.
Configuration is a snap! CAPSYS CAPTURE Email Gateway has a simple to use, user interface which is designed for the business analyst to setup and configure. No programming or scripting is required.
Our built in message interrogation capability allows the Gateway to either accept or reject the message based on pre-defined business rules. Each message by replied back with an acknowledgment using an automated message reply. Rules can be based on sender address, whether or not an attachment exists, or if the attachment does not meet the preset requirements.
Find out more about CAPSYS CAPTURE's Email Gateway by
contacting CAPSYS.
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