Delivering Digital Orders to a Customer Deadline

Everything Boxed faced a commercial deadline: its biggest customer required electronic orders and invoices in a particular format. Missing the changeover would put the relationship at risk.

We delivered the trading flow in time, and Everything Boxed kept the customer. The published case study explains the project. These are the delivery choices that made it useful to the operations team.

Define the smallest complete trading flow

The first release had to receive an order, check it, show it to the team, produce the invoice and send that invoice back in the customer's format. Each part depended on the next. An order arriving successfully would mean little if the invoice could not leave.

Reporting and additional features could follow once that complete route worked. The deadline helped make the order of work clear.

Make exceptions part of the design

Real orders contain mistakes. Connections drop. Documents arrive in the wrong format. Before go-live, we tested against the customer's specifications and sample documents, including failure cases.

Incoming and outgoing documents are checked. Quantities, prices, product codes and references are compared with the business data. Invoices are cross-checked against their purchase orders. Mismatches go for review, and invoices can queue when the connection is down.

Those checks give the operations team a way to deal with exceptions without having to diagnose the software.

Leave the team able to answer the customer

The dashboard shows new and flagged orders, waiting and sent invoices, and the items that need attention. The team can find a document and answer a customer query in minutes.

That visibility is part of the result. An integration should move information between systems and help people understand what happened.

If a customer has given your business a digital trading deadline, tell us the requirement and the date. We can work out what must be delivered first.