Purchase Orders

OCR Document Management Service For Purchase Orders

Purchase Orders - The Life Blood of Your Business

The profit margin of your business is that critical line dividing how much you make from how much you must spend to make it. How well you process purchase orders goes a long way to determining whether you stay in the black or fall into the red. When new orders come in, they must be processed as quickly and efficiently as possible, regardless of the order format. Delays, errors, or other order entry problems mean higher costs, lower customer satisfaction, and pressure on your profit margin.

The Problem: Accepting order in Multiple Unstructured Formats

After years of work to convert as many customers as possible to your EDI standard for order submission, you still receive hard copy orders via fax, email and even mail. Whether these hard copy orders represent 10% or 90% of your overall order volume, processing them is time consuming, expensive, and prone to errors.

In Search of the Perfect Order

Unfortunately, for most companies, manual order processing means errors, delays, and rework. Whether it’s a sales order, purchase order, or work order, entering hard copy customer orders come with a variety of challenges. These include:

Incoming Order Capture

• Hard copy orders arrive in via multiple methods – fax, email, and/or mail • Transmission delays and paper handling errors slow down and hold up order entry • Inventory Control challenges tracking every order in hard copy form

Order Processing

• Manual data entry is slow and costly • There are no standard formats (every order is different) – Adding order entry staff is difficult, often requiring months of training • Key entry errors cause problems and delay orders • Incorrect or incomplete order information prevents processing

Exception Handling

• Information on orders does not match internal systems data (e.g. SKUs, Bill-to, Ship-to, Account information) • Order processing rules typically reside in the minds of order entry staff (or on yellow post-it note stuck on the sides do their    computer monitors) • Correction of flawed and incomplete orders is time consuming and labor intensive • Processing delays can lead to changed, postponed, and/or canceled orders For most companies today, the bottom line is that receiving and entering orders is a complicated mix of manual steps with relatively little benefit from automation. This mix slows down order fulfillment, costs money, and creates errors.

OCR Service Solves this Problem

OCR Service Bureau provides advanced, automated order entry and management services that speed up order entry, increase
accuracy, and reduce your costs.

OCR Service Bureau Order Management Process

OCR Service Bureau order processing services utilize advanced “free-form” OCR document/character recognition combined with intelligent human verification to provide maximum efficiency for hardcopy (fax, email, and mail) order entry processing.

Our solution includes:

Incoming Order Management

Fax and e-mail orders are captured directly by Strategic-EDI’s systems and routed through a series of automated processing steps. Our advanced inventory control capabilities track every page of every order to ensure all orders are processed. Strategic-EDI also offers mail room services, and can process hard copy orders quickly and efficiently.

Automated Order Entry

Utilizing advanced “free-form” optical character recognition and document classification technologies, Strategic-EDI is able to directly capture most order data automatically. Our double-pass human review steps, as well as relational data validation lookups finish off the process ensuring highly accurate data.

Exception Handling

Those few orders that fail processing validation edits are sent to work-flow queues on the web-based exception servers. There, customer service specialists from your organization can clear exceptions via a customized web interface.

Paperless Processing

Incoming orders are rapidly and efficiently processed by our platform to create a complete data and image record. The OCR platform can upload EDI files directly into your order fulfillment system, faster and more accurately than ever before. Additionally, images of the original documents are indexed and uploaded to image archive systems for long-term secure storage and instant retrieval.

Advantages of our OCR Order Processing Services

• Administrative Cost Reductions – 30% - 60% hard dollar savings
• Real-Time Order Processing – 20 - 30 minute turnaround
• Leveling of Peak Processing – Consistent turnarounds regardless of peaks
• Significant Reduction in Error Related Loses – Reduces returns and charge backs
• Improves Your Customers Satisfaction – Consistent, accurate, on-time deliveries

Bottom Line

Our Service will speed up your order entry, improve your order accuracy, eliminate peak processing challenges, and reduce your costs.

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What sets Paper-to-EDI Service Apart?  Our V2 Technology Platform

Our services are supported by the most sophisticated and advanced data extraction and work-flow technologies. Our proprietary V2 production platform represents best-in-class technology. Some of V2's unique features and capabilities include:

"Free Form" OCR Technologies

At the heart of the V2 technology platform are the most advanced recognition systems available. We have developed best-in-class free form OCR, ICR and OMR engines, forms factors and recognition tools to create a world-class automated recognition system.

Data Translation

V2 can map invoice data to virtually every ERP system including: SAP, Oracle, JD Edwards, and more. Not to mention any and all standard EDI data formats, as well as custom file formats.

Inventory Control

Utilizing a centralized inventory control database, Strategic-EDI tracks every page of every order through every step of our production processes. The sophistication and precision of our inventory tracking is the reason we can offer SLA guarantees of 100% inventory control.

Quality Program

Our Quality Program starts with our commitment to our customers. Understanding our customer’s expectations and knowing how well we fulfill those expectations drives everything we do. Like many best in class organizations, we measure our organization’s success by the number of promoters we create among our customer base. Customer input also helps us prioritize our process improvement efforts.  When process problems are identified, we use quality improvement methodologies such as LEAN and SIX SIGMA to continuously improve those areas. Whether it’s a cycle time improvement opportunity where we can apply LEAN concepts to take out waste and non-value added work, or a defect reduction project that may benefit from the statistical and analytical rigor of SIX SIGMA, we use proven tools to improve both the speed and effectiveness with which we deliver services to customers.

SLA Guarantees

Our SLA (Service Level Agreement) Guarantees are customized to meet the specific needs of each of our clients. In most cases our SLAs focus on three specific quality measurements: DATA ACCURACY, TURNAROUND and INVENTORY CONTROL.

Data Accuracy

Minimum Data Accuracy Rates of 99.5% or Better TURNAROUND 20 – 30 Minute Delivery of Purchase Order Data and Indexed Image Files

Inventory Control

100% of Documents Accounted for and Recorded

Security

We take the safety and security of your data very seriously. We understand the consequences to our clients, of a security breach.  In 14 years of processing financial documents, we have never had a security breach. This is because our service utilizes the most advance security protocols available. Highlights include:

• All data and image files are stored and managed from highly secure Class A data centers.
• Unlike others, we do not transfer data or image files overseas, to at-home staff, or remote data editing centers.
• Each employee is subject to thorough background screenings utilizing nationally recognized investigation bureaus. We run complete background and credit checks on all new hires.
• We conduct monthly security audits in conjunction with our SAS70 Type II certification.

Dependability

Dependability in purchase order data lift services means consistently meeting accuracy and turnaround time commitments and maintaining high system up-times.  provides you the most dependable performance anywhere. But our view of dependability goes beyond these measures. We also believe that being highly responsive and quick to resolve customer requests is paramount.

About Us

OCR Service Bureau is an outsourced solutions provider specializing in automated data extraction and document management solutions.  We enable our clients to benefit from cutting-edge technologies without the financial, IT, and personnel resources traditionally required. Our services create efficiencies that generate savings in operating budgets. We are paid with a portion of these savings.