bMail

bMail is a direct bboss-to-bboss communication channel. We have introduced a small part of it with the 'Price Request' feature, but we are now going to expand upon this to other documents, and with the work that has been put into the e-commerce integration we now have a solid foundation on which to build it.

Our approach is going to be to do this in phases, prioritising the channels that we believe will have the biggest impact.

Phase 1: Purchase Order to Sales Order

The first process that will be supported is sending a purchase order. There is a lot of manual data entry done here, and a lot of this can be automated.

Currently, when a purchase order is sent via email, the supplier needs to raise a sales order, manually reenter all of the information, email the sales order back, and then mark it as accepted.

With bMail, all of the information from your purchase order will pulled into the sales order that they are creating, and as long as this is all okay, they can bMail it back to you and the purchase order will be accepted automatically.

Phase 2: Despatch & Invoice

Next will be automating a lot of the work done in the despatch process. Since we now have a connection between orders, we can add another layer of automation.

If a purchase order has been sent via bMail and the supplier has raised a sales order for this, when this sales order is despatched we can push that data across and mark the connected purchase order as completed, and the sales order on your side as despatched.

The supplier will be given the appropriate delivery documents automatically so that they do not need to be requested.

The invoice from the supplier will also be sent and automatically create a purchase invoice.

Phase 3: Credit Notes

Credit notes will be a fairly quick and straightforward process to implement at this stage, and will simply be a credit note being sent and creating a purchase credit on the other side.

Phase 4: Quotes

Since 'Price Request' already exists, we will be leaving quotes until last. It will be an overhaul of the existing system, with quote requests replacing price requests. There is more planning to be done before we can flesh out how this will operate.