PPAI Technology Summit Awards: ‘Holy Grail’ of Automated Order Processing Earns Essent® VP Internal Innovator Distinction

PPAI Technology Summit Internal Innovator Award Logo

Essent Vice President of Research Stephen Luisser earned the 2016 PPAI Technology Summit Internal Innovator Award for a solution that’s being described as the Holy Grail for the promotional products industry.

Luisser leveraged Essent OrderTrax® Network technology to create a solution that can transmit a completely-processed Well-Formed™ order from a distributor’s ecommerce website to a supplier’s production floor in a matter of seconds.

Automated Order Processing is a solution that helps not just individual companies but the promotional products industry as a whole.

The automated order processing solution is designed to eliminate supply chain friction and the steep costs of order processing. The result is more efficient relationships between distributors, decorators, and suppliers.

Mr. Luisser received the award at the 2016 PPAI Technology Summit in San Francisco.

"I’m deeply honored to receive the 2016 PPAI Technology Summit Internal Innovator Award because Automated Order Processing is a solution that helps not just individual companies but the promotional products industry as a whole. It’s additionally special to receive the honor at the Tech Summit, an event that Essent sponsors because the lessons learned at the conference help the industry as a whole,” Mr. Luisser said.

The solution earned the moniker "The Holy Grail” at the inaugural PPAI Technology Summit when a speaker used the phrase to describe Automated Order Processing as highly valuable.

The Automated Order Processing solution uses the Essent Product Configuration Engine to generate electronic, custom Well-Formed orders, which are complete, error-free, and therefore ready for automated processing.

The Well-Formed Order is then transmitted automatically and in real-time via the Essent OrderTrax Network. OrderTrax is the promotional products industry-standard electronic data interchange for trading partner integration.

The crux of the problem is that distributors’ and suppliers’ business management systems commonly do not provide all of the order data necessary to generate and process a Well-Formed order — a term Essent coined in 2004 to describe the problem.

The Essent OrderTrax Network, in combination with software elements like the OrderTrax Connector, overcomes the problem by providing the data missing from the orders and transforming the order documents — like Purchase Order, Order Status, Advance Ship Notices, and Invoices — into a format each trading partners’ native Business Management Systems or ERPs can understand and process without much or any human intervention.

The result is a complete, accurate order completely processed and ready for the production floor in a matter of seconds with no time- and labor-intensive manual intervention required.

The Internal Innovator Award highlights the technological achievement within a PPAI member company and showcases the work of IT teams using unique technology or a unique use or implementation of existing technology.