A Power Automate solution that extracts data from ERP-exported PDFs to automatically route, draft, and dispatch purchase orders to international suppliers in their native languages.
Operative purchasing agents frequently face high-volume, repetitive administrative tasks that bottleneck more valuable strategic operations. In my role, sending out individual purchase order (PO) emails to suppliers manually was consuming hours of valuable time each week.
To solve this, I designed and built an automation workflow using Power Automate that completely takes over the extraction, matching, and drafting process for POs exported from the ERP system.
The primary challenge was managing non-standardized document layouts. Because the PO templates varied significantly depending on the language and region of the target supplier, a simple absolute-coordinate text scrape would consistently fail.
I resolved this by implementing pre-processing conditional logic that scans the document for regional keywords, dynamically shifting the parsing boundaries based on the detected language before attempting to isolate the Supplier Number.
This project gave me deep experience in business process automation (RPA) and error-resilient system architecture. Beyond the technical implementation, the biggest win was the organizational impact.
By eliminating the manual data-entry bottleneck, we vastly reduced human error and drastically shaved down the operative cycle time. This successful transition freed up our purchasing team to shift away from administrative maintenance and focus heavily on high-leverage strategic functions, such as managing competitive tender processes.