Purchase Order Data Entry Automation using Document AI

In the competitive world of enterprise business, manual purchase order processing often requires dedicated staff members, leading to significant labor costs. This case study reveals how Youvit revolutionized their purchase order management system by transitioning from manual processing to intelligent automation, achieving remarkable cost efficiency and operational improvements.

Before automation, Youvit allocated a full-time staff member to handle purchase order processing, incurring a monthly salary cost of 5.5M IDR. This staff member spent countless hours manually processing purchase orders from multiple distributors, each using different formats and submission methods. Beyond the salary costs, this manual approach tied up valuable human resources in repetitive tasks that could be automated.

The Challenge

The Company Challenge

Before implementing automation, Youvit faced common challenges in purchase order management that many businesses struggle with today. Their team spent countless hours manually processing purchase orders from multiple distributors, each using different formats and submission methods. This labor-intensive process consumed valuable resources and introduced risks of human error in data entry.

The Developer Challenge

As a developer, I faced a complex challenge in creating an automated purchase order processing system. The core technical hurdles were extracting data from 7 different distributor (and still growth) formats and developing a robust preprocessing pipeline that could handle diverse document structures.

Connecting to Gmail and automatically retrieving attachments proved equally challenging, requiring sophisticated email parsing and document detection algorithms. Each distributor's unique format demanded a flexible, intelligent data extraction approach that could adapt to varying document layouts.

Results

The implementation of PO Tracker delivered measurable results across multiple business metrics:

System Architecture

A comprehensive overview of how the PO Tracker system is structured and integrated.

How It Works

Cloud Scheduler

PO Tracker runs every hour from 7 AM to 7 PM, Monday to Friday, using Google Cloud Scheduler to check for new emails automatically.

Cloud Functions

A cloud function scans email inboxes for new POs, downloads PDFs, splits them into pages, and stores them in distributor-specific Cloud Storage buckets.

Document AI

Document AI extracts important information from PDFs. Custom rules validate and clean data for each distributor's unique format.

BigQuery Integration

Processed data connects to BigQuery for analytics, allowing teams to track distributor stock, sales performance, and SLAs.

“The PO Tracker is amazing! We can check all Purchase Orders easily, track their status, and monitor delivery progress. It's accurate, always up-to-date, and has significantly improved our order management efficiency.” - Key Account Manager

Conclusion

Youvit's success demonstrates how purchase order automation can transform business operations. With a 88% reduction in processing costs and 92% improvement in processing time, the results speak to the powerful impact of intelligent automation in modern business operations.

By leveraging Google Cloud technologies, including Document AI, Cloud Functions, and BigQuery, this project achieved significant efficiency gains while dramatically reducing operating costs. The automated system continues to deliver value by freeing up human resources for higher-value tasks while maintaining exceptional accuracy in purchase order processing.