Automatically Processing Customer Orders

With an intelligent agent software platform, such as SmartOps24x7™ from SmartOpsMgt, orders from a wide variety of sources can be processed by intelligent agents which perform all the “intelligent grunt work” needed to automatically process these orders, instead of people.

These intelligent agents can perform tasks such as:

1. Interacting with source systems to pick up new customer orders as they arrive
2. Converting customer orders into work orders and shipment orders for finished products
3. Predicting demand for raw and intermediate products
4. Grouping orders for efficient processing, including routing to best available plant and scheduling operations
5. Generating purchase requisitions and work orders to make intermediate products
6. Tracking customer orders and notifying ordering systems of progress or directly sending Emails to customers
7. Alerting managers and sales people when customer orders are running late so they can take corrective action.

The tracking of the customer orders and dynamic intra-day production scheduling can be done by theWIPtracker data collection system.

WIPtracker receives orders from SmartOps24x7, which it uses to dynamically schedule and track production, as well as picking, packing and shipping operations. WIPtracker then provides SmartOps24x7 with the order and materials status information that its intelligent agents need to efficiently process the incoming order flow.

These intelligent agents mostly use rules, decision trees, and mathematical computations to make their decisions.

They are written as Python scripts so that their actions are deterministic, easy to understand, and easy to tailor to the specific needs of each operation by IT people, business analysts and manufacturing engineers.

In this way, a complex flow of customer orders, can be processed automatically 24x7, with human intervention only being required when something unexpected goes wrong, such as needed raw materials fail to arrive on time. And, even then, intelligent agents can be setup to automatically manage such variability in the raw materials supply chain

While it can take some time to setup all the intelligent agents to automatically process a complex flow of customer orders, the savings in labor cost over doing these tasks manually can be huge, enabling ROI payback time of 6 months or less.

Also, human mistakes can be avoided and, most important of all, this enables customer orders shipped on time without the need for expediters or other such support people. Also, customers can be automatically kept up-to-date on the status of their orders without needing to call customer service people, again with more savings in labor cost.

Please click here to see some of the agents involved in this process.