Customer PO processing for Dallas manufacturers, done for you

The PO lands on the last business day of the quarter, nine pages and 118 lines. Brackets in four finishes, fasteners in three lengths, a dozen gaskets that differ by one letter at the end of the part number. Every part number on it is the customer’s, not yours. The buyer wants promise dates on every line before they leave for the weekend.

Your order desk has seen this customer’s orders before, so they know roughly what to do. They print the PO, open the cross-reference spreadsheet in one window and the ERP in another and start at line one. Forty lines in, the phone has rung three times. By line 80 they have found two part numbers that aren’t in the spreadsheet and a price that doesn’t match last quarter’s quote. The order goes in Monday afternoon, a full business day after the buyer wanted those dates. Nobody is sure every line is right.

This page is for Dallas manufacturers who want that work taken off their team. We’re a Dallas company that does it for you, on the systems you already run.

What we take off your plate

The work we take on is customer purchase orders that arrive by email. That includes the long, high-mix ones: many lines, many part numbers, mixed units and notes buried at the bottom. It covers the short reorders too.

Here is what that means in practice.

• Reading every PO, whatever its format. A PDF from the buyer’s purchasing system, a scanned copy, a spreadsheet with extra tabs or a few lines typed in the email body all get read for what they say.
• Turning their part numbers into yours. Each line is matched to your part using the cross-reference you keep today, wherever it lives. Their units become the units you sell in. Their price is compared with what that customer should pay.
• Running the checks your team already makes. Is the ship-to on file? Is the quantity far off this customer’s usual? Is the part still active? Those checks get written down once and run on every order, every time.
• Putting clean orders where they belong. An order that passes every check goes into your ERP, or waits there for one person to approve it. You choose for each customer.
• Handing the unclear ones to a person. If anything on an order doesn’t match, the whole order goes to your team with the question marked. Their answer is kept, so that question shouldn’t come back on the next PO.

Your customers change nothing. They keep sending POs to the same inbox in the same formats.

What a 118-line PO costs when it’s keyed by hand

A 118-line PO is an afternoon nobody on the desk gets back. A short reorder takes a few minutes. A long PO with unfamiliar part numbers can take most of an afternoon, and the person keying it can’t answer the phone or chase a late shipment while they do.

The less obvious cost is what slips through. On a long order, line 93 gets the same care as line 3 only if the person keying it never gets tired or interrupted. A wrong finish code means a part built to the wrong spec. A unit read as eaches instead of boxes means a short shipment. Those mistakes usually surface on the shop floor or at the customer’s dock, not at the desk where they started.

Then there is the waiting. A PO that sits until tomorrow is a day the floor can’t plan around. When the buyer calls to ask whether the order is in, someone stops what they are doing to check.

You can size the hours with your own numbers. As an example, take two people who each spend about 10 hours a week keying customer POs, at a loaded cost of $32 an hour. Change the figures to match your desk.

People doing it

2

Hours each, per week

10

Loaded cost per hour

$32

Hours per month

87

Cost per year

$33,280

Hours back per month

43–61

An estimate from the numbers above, not a client result. It assumes 50%–70% of the work can be taken off your team; your audit checks that against your own numbers.

That example comes to 1,040 hours a year at the keyboard, before a single remade part or chasing call is counted.

The same nine pages, with the keying off your desk

Picture that 118-line PO arriving again. This time nobody prints it.

It is read line by line. The customer’s part numbers are matched against the cross-reference your team built over the years. Their units are converted to yours, and each price is compared with the quote on file. The quantity on each line is checked against what that customer usually orders.

Most of the 118 lines should match without anyone touching them. The two unknown part numbers and the price that doesn’t match last quarter’s quote don’t get guessed at. The order goes to the person who used to key it, with those three questions marked next to the original PO.

They answer the three questions. The order goes in. The two new part numbers are now in the cross-reference, so the next PO from that customer shouldn’t raise them again.

What used to be an afternoon of typing can shrink to a short list of decisions. The person on the desk spends that last afternoon of the quarter on the orders that need judgment, and on the customers who need a call back.

What your team still decides

Taking the keying away doesn’t take the judgment away. Your team still owns the calls that need someone who knows the customer.

They decide which customers’ orders go straight in and which wait for approval. A new customer, or one whose POs are often messy, can stay on approval as long as you like. A customer whose orders run clean for weeks can move to going straight in.

They answer every question an order raises: a part number nobody has seen, a ship-to that isn’t on file or a price below the last quote. Nothing unclear gets entered on a guess.

And their answers become the record. The customer quirks that live in one person’s head today end up written down so a new hire can learn them. The desk also keeps moving more often when that person is on vacation.

When a late order means a missed truck

Southern Dallas County is home to the International Inland Port of Dallas, which a 2018 local business news report describes as anchored by a major railroad’s intermodal terminal. That report says the area had mostly drawn large distribution centers, with interest in bringing manufacturing plants there too. It is mentioned here to describe the local economy, not as a client.

Plants shipping out of the inland port run on pickup schedules. An order still on the desk at two o’clock can miss the truck, so a long PO that goes in sooner more often makes it onto the next load. You can see the rest of our work across Dallas on its own page.

How we work with Dallas businesses

We’re based in Dallas. Most of the work happens by video call, which keeps it quick for your team. When it helps to see the order desk or the floor in person, we come to your office or plant.

It starts with a free 20-minute audit call about how POs reach you and where the hours go. You get a written plan within 48 hours and a fixed-scope quote after the audit. Your first workflow goes live within 14 days of access to your tools. It runs on the tools you already use, connecting to your current ERP and to the inbox your customers send to today. An older on-premise system is fine.

If you want to read more before the call, these guides go deeper on the problems behind this page:

• Stopping the retyping without a new ERP, for plants on an older system.
• Keying customer POs into your ERP, for make-to-order shops.
• Catching revised customer POs before the old version gets built.
• Keeping up with weekly release schedules when customers won’t send EDI.

There are more in our guides for manufacturers. To see how a project is scoped for order-heavy businesses, read order automation for distribution and manufacturing.

What changes on your order desk

Long POs should eat far fewer afternoons. Your team spends its time on the few lines that raise a question instead of the many that don’t.

Fewer wrong parts should reach the floor. Unknown part numbers, odd quantities and prices that don’t fit the quote are more often caught while they are still questions.

Orders tend to go in sooner, so the floor can plan around them and buyers chase less.

And what your most experienced person knows about each customer ends up written down, where the whole desk can use it. Book a free audit to see what that would look like for your plant.