[Pam Palmer]

This is not a “how do I” type of question but rather one of curiosity.

How do you handle the acknowledgment of a new order from a customer? 
Do you simply send them a copy of the order and stamp it acknowledgment? 
Do you have an automated form that you use?
Is it the salesperson’s responsibility to acknowledge the order before it gets entered into the system?
Do you have your salespeople enter the order or do you have a separate order entry department that enters the order and are they the one to acknowledge the order?

We’ve been on GP for several years now (currently 2013R2) and we have tried a few different methods of getting an acknowledgment to our customers.  Most of the time it appears the customer doesn’t understand what we are trying to do and think that we are invoicing them for material that has not shipped.

I’m looking to refine how we do it (currently which is to send a copy of their order and stamped acknowledgment).

Thanks for your input.
Pam

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Pam Palmer
Projects/Database Admin
Temple, Inc.
Decatur AL
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[Aleiha Hanson]

? with our sales orders, we do all of our acknowledgements outside of GP.
Depending on how we receive the orders, we typically acknowledge two different ways. If a customer emails us, we reply back with a simple thank you and an ESD (no details beyond that). If it is an order that we receive via EDI, then they receive an automated receipt that we have the PO and then some customers get an actual PO acknowledgement back with details via our EDI system.

We are simple in the fact that we do not have any outside sales reps, our orders come in 99.9% electronically (email or EDI) and we only have one person entering. ?

Good luck in your quest for finding a way to make all the customers (and sales staff) happy and efficient!

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Aleiha Hanson
Royal Basket Trucks, Inc – IT Manager
GPUG Milwaukee WI Chapter Leader
ahanson@royal-basket.com
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[Pam Palmer]

  Thank you for your feedback.

May I ask what EDI you are using? Also you mentioned:  ?”If it is an order that we receive via EDI, then they receive an automated receipt that we have the PO and then some customers get an actual PO acknowledgement back with details via our EDI system.”

How does this work that only “some” would get an actual PO ack?

Thanks,
Pam

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Pam Palmer
Projects/Database Admin
Temple, Inc.
Decatur AL
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[Aleiha Hanson]

^{We use a few different platforms for our EDI depending on the customer. Our preferred partner is True Commerce though. We use them for a few customers and we have them integrated with GP. I can share more details with you via a call or message if you’d like.}

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Aleiha Hanson
Royal Basket Trucks, Inc – IT Manager
GPUG Milwaukee WI Chapter Leader
ahanson@royal-basket.com
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[Joseph C. Markovich]

Hi Pam-

I can’t speak for the EDI portion of it since we don’t use it yet, but all of our POs from customers are emailed to our customer service reps. They enter the orders.

At the end of the day, we send an acknowledgement via email from GP with an attachment of the order. If there are any backordered items on their order, we have a little starred note showing we will provide an estimated ship date later. This happens once we get confirmation from the vendors of our PO to them.

Once we get the confirmation from the vendor, we send an update at the end of the day back to the customer. This is an attachment of the back order with estimated ship dates. The back order and the PO are linked, so this is how GP knows what back orders and what customers to email.

Let me know if you have other questions. I hope this gives some insight.

Thank you.
-Joe

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Joseph Markovich
IT Manager
Okaya Electric America
Valparaiso IN
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[Patti Sharer]

Hello ?.

Our process is a combination of what Aleiha and Joe responded.  Orders go to sales reps and I believe they respond with an email “received, pricing is correct.”  We have a few customers who require a formal acknowledgement.  For those I send an email with a PDF attachment of the sales order.  The title/header on the sales order states “Sales Order Acknowledgement”. That header combined with an email subject of Acknowledgement has never caused confusion for the customer thinking it is an invoice (also, we email the acknowledgements to the purchasing side of the customer and not to the billing email address).  The body of the email is “Please see the attached order acknowledgement for your PO xxx”.  ESD (or ETA) is xx/xx/xx.

In order to improve customer service, we are looking to do formal acknowledgements from GP down the road – in a process similar to what explained. Wouldn’t it be great if sales order acknowledgements from GP could include the ESD?!  I know we get acknowledgements from most of our vendors and most of them have the ESD printed on the acknowledgement – no need for a second email.

?

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Patti Sharer [Designation]
Accounting/Customer Service
Hastings Air-Energy Control
New Berlin WI
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[Katie Pieczynski]

Hi Joe,
I have a question for you.  We manually email our customers an acknowledgement.  So when the sales rep enters the order they print it to a pdf and then email it to the buyer stating it is an order confirmation.  This works just fine but I am curious how you email it out of GP.  We use GP 2015 and I email invoices directly out of GP, but I could not figure out a way to have orders emailed out of GP without it going to the AP person. 

In the internet information screen on the customer card under e-mail addresses this is where the AP persons email is so when I send invoices it goes to them.
Sales keeps their buyers emails under the e-mail section of Internet information.  Is there another place they could put that and we can segregate orders to one email and invoices to another? 
Thanks,

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Katie Pieczynski
Accounts Receivable Manager
DANSR
Champaign IL
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[Paul Dyer]

We do it several ways, EDI of course is electronic (we use Data Mason’s Vantage Point, Highly recommended).
Web Orders are emailed by our Website, (We run on VendorFuel).

Email/Faxed orders and orders we get from xml systems (Ariba, etc), I wrote a job using Scribe Insight that when the order is created, it uses SQL’s built in “SQLMail” stored procedures to structure a template, then use a SQL query to pull the order information, and send it. It’s a very effective and efficient/automated way to do it, and really not too difficult to configure. It’s able to determine if the email was sent by setting a flag in an unused salesorder field.
On the XML based orders, it also creates and sends the response XML confirmation to the system also as part of the same job.

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Paul Dyer
IT Director
Hoffman Technologies (Dba: Item Grabber)
http://www.itemgrabber.com
ROCKLIN CA
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[Joseph C. Markovich]

Hi Katie-

We made a business decision about two or three years ago to keep all contact information in CRM. So all of our information is stored in CRM and there is a yes/no selection to send order acknowledgements, shipping notifications, etc.

Previously, we used the email address fields in the Internet Information screen, but ran into the same problem you are facing. Instead of trying to reinvent the wheel or make some kind of other contact fields with Extender or something, we just decided everything people-related goes into CRM.

Our order acknowledgements and updates are sent out using Dynamics Report Manager from Rockton Software — all of our customer-facing forms are in SSRS. We schedule the reports through its scheduler and at 5pm every business day, it sends them to all of the contacts that have the order acknowledgement yes/no set to yes.

We started using Dynamics Report Manager because we have some very heavily customized forms based on customer requirements — and managing that with Report Writer, VBA and the Word Templates was becoming unworkable.

I hope this helps. Let me know if you have any other questions.

Thanks.
-Joe

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Joseph Markovich
IT Manager
Okaya Electric America
Valparaiso IN
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[Michael Gummel]

   I’m not sure if you are still looking for a solution, but we have created an automated email confirmation out of GP.  Please contact me if you’d like more information or check out our products on ptcllc.com/home/gp-enhance.html??.

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Michael Gummel
Prod Engineer
Paradigm Technology Consulting
Allentown NJ
mgummel@ptcllc.com
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