Part 1: Introduction

By: Mike Catalfamo

Being a business owner can have many challenges, particularly for small and medium sized companies.  Those who attempt to leverage the vast and rapidly-changing sea of technology can realize substantial operational efficiencies, gain valuable market insights and increase their competitive advantage; all of which translate into increased profits.

Over the next few weeks, I will be sharing some ideas about what you can do as a business owner to minimize work and potential errors when working with data in disparate formats or systems.  To help illustrate this, I’m going to use an example of integrating an eCommerce cart with an ERP/Accounting System.  Throughout the series of articles, I will illustrate how Sandy our fictitious eCommerce owner runs her business and overcomes the challenges of re-keying data.  Before we begin, here are two important things you can do prior to undertaking an integration or automation project:

1)      Understand Internal Processing and Fulfillment Steps– You can’t automate a fuzzy process so if you’re leading the charge on this eCommerce integration project, you need to know how things work internally as best you can.  Here are a few examples to get you thinking:

• Who validates the orders that are entered in your accounting system and how is the order passed to the next person or department?
• Who is responsible for getting the shipment tracking number into the accounting system and associated with the correct business document?
• At what point is an order converted to an invoice and posted to the GL?

2)      Be Flexible – Now that you understand your business flow, the best consultants will work with you to find a solution to fit your business with minimal disruption to this process.   That said, even with the best software and consulting advice there are times when you may have to tweak your business process.  Try to keep focused on the big picture goals you’re trying to achieve.  You will need to recognize that processing decisions will be heavily based on the contents of the data itself and cannot require human intervention to make decisions.  Exceptions to the process should be clearly identified and rules should be clearly defined.

Overview of Order Fulfillment Cycle

Sandy, a distributor for a small independent book publisher is running a B2C eCommerce site called Sandy Shore Books.  She has been successfully processing 30-40 paid orders per month into her accounting system.  Currently, Sandy manually keys the eCommerce orders into her accounting system and updates the eCommerce store along with shipping details.  One of the books on her site has just become a national best-seller and she’s now getting several hundred orders per week and needs to integrate and automate as much of the process to keep up with the demand.  Let’s begin by looking at a simple data flow for integrating orders between Sandy Shore Books and her accounting system:

1)      A buyer purchases and pays for a book on Sandy Shore Books eCommerce store

2)      The order data is picked up by the Integration Platform and converted to a format that will be imported into the accounting system

3)      A Sales Order (or other appropriate document type such as a Sales Receipt or Un-posted Invoice) is created in the accounting system automatically

4)      The Order is reviewed and made available for fulfillment where it is picked, packed and shipped

5)      The accounting system is updated with details such as the shipment date, tracking number and quantities fulfilled and the order is converted to another document type such as a Posted Invoice

6)      The shipment details are sent back to the eCommerce store where the order status is changed and tracking information is provided.

In the following weeks, we’re going to look at the following topics in more detail to see where Sandy may run into issues and see what we can do to help her out:

Part 2: Creating Orders Automatically
Part 3: Inventory Management
Part 4: Order Completion

Article by Mike Catalfamo

Mike Catalfamo has over 10 years' experience delivering integrated eCommerce and EDI solutions and is the Technical Sales Engineer at eBridge Software Inc. When not chasing around his toddler, a few of Mike's interests include playing music, photography, reading, practicing GTD and exploring ways to make the most of technology to integrate and automate information and systems.

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