From PO email to Prophet 21 order
Seven stages, fully instrumented, with a human in the loop before anything touches your ERP. Here is exactly what happens to every purchase order you forward.
1. Ingestion — forward and forget
Every tenant gets a dedicated address like [email protected]. Auto-forward your orders mailbox to it, or have customers CC it directly. We capture the raw email, every attachment, and the message body. Microsoft 365 and Gmail inbox integrations are available for teams that want automatic capture with no forwarding rule.
2. Classification and splitting
One email often carries more than one order: multiple POs in a single PDF, a PO plus a quote, three attachments from three branches. Each document is classified and split so every purchase order becomes its own order record — nothing gets merged or lost.
3. AI extraction with confidence scores
Vision AI reads the document — clean PDF, fax-quality scan, phone photo, Excel with arbitrary columns, or an order typed into the email body, including handwriting. It extracts the customer, PO number, ship-to, requested date, freight terms, and every line item, and attaches a confidence score to each field so uncertainty is visible, never hidden.
4. SKU matching against your item master
Each line runs through a matching pipeline: exact and normalized lookups against your P21 item master and customer part numbers, then semantic matching on descriptions, then fuzzy matching for near-misses. On top sits the alias table — every correction your team has ever made. The messy string a customer always uses resolves instantly the second time. Unit-of-measure conversions and contract pricing are validated at the same step.
5. Review — seconds, not minutes
Your CSR sees the source document and the drafted order side by side. Matched lines are pre-filled; low-confidence fields and unmatched items are highlighted in an exception queue. Accept, or click to correct — and every correction trains the alias table for next time.
6. Write-back — a native P21 sales order
One click creates the order through the Prophet 21 Transaction API — real oe_hdr and oe_line records with your customer ID, ship-to, PO number, and item IDs — and returns the P21 order number to the screen. No CSV exports, no re-keying, no middleware to babysit. Sites without the API entitlement can use the batch-import fallback.
7. Audit trail — every step recorded
The source document, every extracted value with its confidence, every human correction, and the exact payload written to P21 with the returned order number are stored immutably. When anyone asks why an order shipped the way it did, the answer is one search away.
Start in shadow mode
For your pilot, OrderDrafter runs the whole pipeline on your live inbound POs but writes nothing to Prophet 21. Your team watches drafted orders appear next to the source documents and judges the accuracy on real orders — your customers, your part numbers, your mess. When the accuracy has earned it, flip one switch and orders start posting with one-click confirm. Most teams are fully live in under a week.
Stop keying purchase orders by hand
Design-partner spots are open for Prophet 21 distributors. Go live in under a week — no consultants, no IT project.