How TMEIC and Other Customers are Using AventX to Improve Delivery Options and Speed Up Workflows

Most companies using AventX are doing so to automate the transmission or delivery (email, fax, print, network/cloud archive) of purchase orders, invoices, and other critical documents in batches. While batch is the most common use case, some of our customers deliver documents with AventX interactively from Submit Request, some use it from a workflow, and others use it from various places throughout the document creation and review process.

One handy technique some clients use is the AventX Standalone Interactive Delivery Form or—as our friends at TMEIC refer to it—the AventX Magic Button.

Dennis Collins, a Senior ERP Business Analyst for TMEIC Corporation, has shared this anecdote with us many times in the past on the phone and at COLLABORATE shows; we were finally able to catch and document his remarks when he presented “Delivering EBS Documents That Require a Digital Signature” at the OATUG Forum Online in April (2020). (Full Presentation | Dennis’ Comments start at 26:22)

We’re sharing all this because we were working with another customer recently on an interesting situation. They wanted the ability to send purchase orders to multiple email and fax destinations quickly from the Oracle EBS Purchasing module, something you can’t do with out-of-the-box functionality. While they, like TMEIC, were struggling with purchase orders, the reality is that this can be implemented in almost any area of Oracle EBS.

Solving customer challenges with the Magic Button

The challenge this client was facing was that Oracle EBS doesn’t allow for multiple supplier, employee, or hard-coded email addresses when emailing purchase orders from the PO Approval workflow. In addition, they needed to be able to submit purchase orders for distribution from several other areas within the Oracle Purchasing module.

They had an idea to improve their processes by using the AventX software’s Magic Button and adding it to the Purchase Order Header Form, instead of the Purchase Order Creation Form. This was because most of the purchase orders are created automatically and would allow the users to deliver the po via email without closing the PO entry form.

They gave it a shot and it worked great!

How their process looks now

1. The user goes to the Purchase Order Summary screen, creates a query for the purchase order, and display the results.

2. The user highlights the desired PO and clicks the Magic Button that was added to the Oracle Menu.

3. Up pops the AventX Interactive Delivery form, which allows users to interactively send documents to (nearly) an unlimited number of email, fax, printer, and archive destinations.

What’s next?

Seeing the benefits that the AventX Magic Button for the Purchase Order Summary screen provided this client’s users sparked even more ideas on how to give them quick access to other forms they use constantly.

Their next thought centered around how to speed up access to the delivery status of previously submitted purchase orders. They added two more buttons to the Oracle Menu.

1. Button to pop the AventX Delivery Status Form, which allows users to check on the status of transmitted documents.

2. Button to pop the AventX WebManager, which can be used to quickly resend purchase orders.
   

In the end, users are thrilled because they are saving a great deal of time by not having to navigate around Oracle EBS to find the information they need. These three buttons quickly give them what they need when they need it most, which is pretty neat to hear and see!

Why your supplier portal may be doing more harm than good

But what about the human beings on the other end? Your suppliers.

Put yourself in their shoes—

• “Oh, great. Another login to remember.”
• “Didn’t I already create this account?”
• “I just need the Purchase Order.”
• “Where is the ‘upload’ button?”

And we aren’t the only ones that feel this way. Others have written about how suppliers feel about portals and how portals are causing companies headaches.

Portals aren’t exactly a breeze on your end, either. Onboarding new suppliers can be an infuriating and time-consuming process. And there’s nothing better than sending out 25-page, 4MB PowerPoint files with how-to information, troubleshooting with top suppliers struggling to get the hang of the portal, talking customers through the password reset process. These things aren’t fun for either side.

Not to mention that some suppliers will outright refuse to use them—they’re too much of a burden to manage.

But your company loves the transparency that supplier portals offer. You know when a purchase order was received and accepted. You *might* even be able to send order acknowledgements directly from your ERP without having to upload them into the portal manually.

At the end of the day, it may make it easier for you and your company. But, forcing suppliers to do the work of managing your purchase orders—in your portal—could prevent your orders from being first in line.

Order Fulfillment at its Finest

Here’s a fairly common scenario: A busy order processing team, who typically relies on email, receives 20 POs into their inbox. Ten of those POs come directly into the email inbox as HTML or PDF Purchase Orders. The other ten come into the inbox from a vendor portal. Guess which orders are more likely to be processed first? If your order is for a hot item in short supply, that could leave you stuck in Backorder City!

So you ask, “Is there some sort of middle ground where I can get this transparency but not put my suppliers through the wringer?” I’m so glad you asked…

Simplified PO Processing for Suppliers

For your suppliers, it makes it easy for them to get what they need to quickly process and deliver your orders. Setting them up for success sets YOU up for a great relationship!

Procurement Software: How do we get Just-In-Time Inventory?

By enhancing your ERP, not replacing it, alternatives to potentially complex and burdensome Procurement Software can provide the core functionality organizations need to operate effectively.

AventX for Oracle EBS (and other ERP systems like SAP, JD Edwards, and more) can provide Purchasing teams with an automated delivery tool that tracks your emailed purchase orders. Advanced logic makes AventX configurable to meet your delivery needs, while implementing embedded tracking mechanisms into your emailed POs, providing you with detailed delivery insights like “delivered,” “opened,” “clicked,” “accepted,” “rejected,” and even “bounced.”

As an alternative to your clunky portals, AventX satisfies your purchasing users’ need to ensure their purchase orders are received and makes it extremely easy for suppliers to trigger the fulfillment request.

Say goodbye to your vendor portal and hello to a better supplier experience!

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The Company

Headquartered in Redwood City, California, Equinix is a multinational company that specializes in connected data centers and related services. With data centers located in 52 markets across five continents, they are the world’s largest interconnection and colocation provider.

The Problem

Equinix had a manual process of sending documents such as invoices and purchase orders to their customers and vendors. This process was prone to human error and required individuals to track sent documents manually. With the company growing fivefold in the last ten years, the number of sent documents has also increased. “As our company is growing, we have more customers and more vendors. We need to communicate with them as fast as possible – time is of the essence,” says Mohan Dutt, Senior Director of IT at Finance Shared Services. He reports that Equinix was manually delivering 10,000 to 15,000 documents and spending 400 to 500 hours monthly on the delivery and follow-up process. The company considered increasing headcount to meet the volume but doing so wouldn’t scale as the business continues to grow. Dutt understood this was a considerable challenge for the company and realized it was time for a solution to automate the document delivery process to keep pace with the business growth.

The Solution

After several years of evaluating various options, Equinix couldn’t find a solution as robust as AventX for Oracle Connector. Dutt states, “The closest one we evaluated was Oracle BI Publisher, but then we had to build additional extensions. With AventX, it all comes together in one box.”

AventX allows Equinix to automatically deliver any volume of Oracle-generated documents while providing flexibility and control. For example, their Brazil branch required each customer’s invoices to include specific attachments. The original delivery process was only able to send one document per email. AventX allows emails to include multiple attachments, saving users’ time and customers from a cluttered inbox. Today, Equinix has a logic to automate document pick-up and delivery through AventX, which is configured to send out documents over five to six hours. There are also reports to monitor which documents were sent and bounced back.

With the implementation of AventX, business users are no longer doing any manual processing, and customers are happy they get their invoices within hours. “The faster these documents reach our customers, the faster we get paid—which is an improvement in our Days Sales Outstanding.” Equinix can also scale up, sending six to seven times more documents than their original delivery process without adding headcount on their business or IT departments. Dutt adds, “AventX has helped us to automate our process and lead us to a very efficient end-to-end process for document delivery.”

In a simplistic form, Schrödinger stated that if you place a cat in a box, then sealed the box closed for a period of time, you essentially would not know if the cat was dead or alive until the box was opened.

Sending emails—like your time-sensitive invoices and POs—from Oracle’s Delivery Manager is pretty much the same.  While Oracle may report that your email was a “Success,” you really have no idea whatsoever whether it reached its destination.

Did someone on the other end really receive that invoice keeping your company’s cash flow moving? Did the intended recipient really lay eyes on your PO ensuring that your organization will have the items needed to function properly?

Is Schrödinger’s cat alive or not? 

Did you get my email?

Because of this lack of insight from Oracle’s “Success” status, senders are, unfortunately, stuck waiting to see if their invoices get paid. However, the whole time the email was never delivered—it was caught in a spam filter or it bounced back to a mailbox that is not monitored.

When the invoice doesn’t get paid on time, senders are required to pick up the phone and call your customer to ensure everything is ok with the payment. The customer says, “I never received the invoice.” Now the employee has to manually resend the invoice via email or, even worse, print the invoice and send it via snail mail to the customer. Then your invoicing department has to constantly check with the customer to ensure the invoice was received.

Unfortunately, this process can take up hours of following up with customers and resending emails while resulting in a delayed payment.

A similar scenario can arise for POs. If your PO doesn’t get delivered your operation can come to standstill while the PO is resent.

So what can you do about it?

Fortunately for your invoices and other important documents, and apologies to the cat, advanced tracking methodologies now exist so you access the status of your emailed document at nearly any point in time.

By delivering your documents through AventX, you can embed tracking mechanisms to any outbound email you send through Oracle EBS. This technology allows the sender to know with a large degree of accuracy whether the email was received, if it bounced (and why!), and if it was clicked or opened.

This level of detail allows Accounts Receivable Managers to monitor invoice delivery proactively and, ultimately, deliver better cash flow to the organization.

By accessing insights into which invoices did not reach their destinations or, more importantly, which invoices were ignored, your AR team can be more targeted with their follow up to your customer.

Supplementing Oracle with AventX delivery technology allows AR teams to be more informed about every email delivery and more targeted with their follow up to customers regarding missing or late payments.

It also provides the information you need to maintain a more accurate email database. By reporting bounced emails with detailed information, you can ensure that you have an accurate email address for every invoice.

So, before you fire off your next customer invoice or purchase order, consider what that “Success” status really means. There’s a chance you’ll be following up in a day or two to confirm that it was received. But with the right technology in place, you’ll know more about your email delivery than Schrödinger knew about his cats.

Tracking whether or not your emails were opened may not be necessary if you’re sending emails to family or friends. But for businesses sending invoices or purchase orders, knowing if an email was read can be crucial to maintaining a healthy cash flow or meeting production deadlines.

So how can you tell if your email was actually read? Let’s take a look at some of the tracking tools available and how they work.

Read receipts

Some email clients like Outlook use read receipt tracking. Senders can request a read receipt prior to sending a message, and each recipient has the option to alert the sender that they received or read the message.

However, there are several reasons why requesting a read receipt doesn’t guarantee you’ll actually get one. Firstly, not all email services support read receipt functionality. Those that do are usually functional only when your recipient is using the same service.

But let’s say both parties are using compatible read receipt programs – even then, users can opt-out of sending the notifications. Some companies even require that users disable read receipts to prevent spammers from acquiring information about their email system.

Pixel tracking

Typically used by marketers, pixel tracking works by inserting a transparent 1×1 pixel image into an email. When that email is opened, the image loads, and the server where the image is stored gets pinged with information including the date and time of access.

But pixel tracking only works if images are loaded when the email is opened. Many users do not automatically load images when opening an email. This preference is often set at the request of IT security departments or in an attempt to limit mobile data usage.

Confirmed Email

Secure Email Delivery through AventX for Oracle EBS, AventX for SAP, AventX for JD Edwards, and other ERPs, is specifically designed for enterprises that have a vested interest in knowing if their emailed documents were delivered and read. Unlike read receipts and pixel tracking, AventX doesn’t have any way for recipients to bypass sharing an access notification with the sender.

When recipients download the documents included in an email, unique tracking allows the sender to see when they opened them and can even alert the sender if a file isn’t opened within a designated time frame.

To learn more about business email 
and delivering important documents, 
download a free copy of our latest ebook! 

As much as we’ve come to rely on email as a form of business communication, it’s not always a dependable delivery method. This can be especially troubling when emailing critical, time-sensitive reports from ERPs like Oracle, SAP, or JD Edwards.

A handful of limitations in Oracle can prevent your invoices or other business documents from reaching their intended recipients on time:

• Automatically generated subject lines and message bodies often end up looking like spam and risk getting caught by junk filters
• You can’t tell whether or not your invoice/PO was delivered successfully
• You can’t tell if your invoice/PO was delivered to the correct recipient
• You can’t tell if the recipient actually read the invoice/PO or not

And if your invoices don’t reach their intended recipients on time, the resulting delay in cash flow can have negative impacts on your company’s bottom line.

Simply put, the native email functionality just doesn’t cut it for most businesses.

But the good news is you can get the delivery and tracking tools you need in Oracle or JD Edwards without developing a complicated custom solution.

Secure Email Delivery through AventX for Oracle EBS, AventX for SAP, AventX for JD Edwards, and other ERPs gives you complete control over your outbound delivery to make sure your invoices, purchase orders or other documents are delivered to the right people at the right time, every time:

• Receive detailed read receipt notifications including the date and time when a recipient reads your email and opens your documents
• Customize your From: address, subject line and message body to prevent system-generated text from triggering spam filters
• Monitor the real-time delivery status of your emails inside Oracle and easily resend emails that failed to deliver or were deleted prior to being read
• Send supplemental attachments with your report in a single email so no piece of information gets overlooked in a busy inbox

To learn more about business email
and delivering important documents,
download a free copy of our latest ebook!