V8 VIDEO TUTORIAL
Enhancing workflow with AOP rules
What you’ll learn in Enhancing workflow with AOP rules
- Know how to create an AOP rule
- Understand how an AOP rule works practically in SOS Inventory
Video transcript: Enhancing workflow with AOP rules
Welcome to our video tutorial, Enhancing Workflow with AOP Rules. Automated order processing, or AOP, allows the creation of sales and purchasing workflows that significantly reduce the manual work required in processing orders. The benefits of AOP include reducing human error, improving operational efficiency, and processing orders faster. SOS Inventory allows you to harness the power of AOP through the software's AOP rules feature.
This presentation will show you how to create an AOP rule and will provide a few examples to demonstrate how those rules can be used in SOS Inventory to process orders.
Creating an AOP rule
To create a rule, under the Task bar's Company menu, choose AOP rules. On the Automated order processing rules list, select Add new.
In this example, the AOP rule specifies that the system should automatically execute certain steps whenever a sales order pertains to a specific customer, Agassi Enterprises. I've given a unique name to the rule that makes it easy to identify. A description is optional, but I've indicated the rule applies to Agassi Enterprises only. I am keeping the Enabled box checked so that the rule goes into effect upon saving.
The fields in the middle section specify the conditions under which the rule applies. For this example, when a sales order is created for customer Agassi Enterprises, the system will perform a sequence of actions as listed in the Do this table. The first action listed in the table involves a change in the order stage. SOS Inventory's Order stages feature allows you to define stages as desired, including the names of stages. Here, the action Move to stage results in the order going to a stage named Received. For Step 2, Assign to a user is the action. The selected user will always be assigned to sales orders for this customer. In Step 3, Notify a user provides a notification to the user assigned to the order, so the same person is chosen. The last action for this AOP rule is Send an email. An email address that is entered here means that a copy of the transaction should always be sent to this address. If the field is left blank, the email will be to sent to the customer's email address as listed on the transaction. In either case, the desired form template for the sales order should be chosen. Since all desired actions have now been entered, it's time to Save and close.
The system has added the new rule to the AOP Rules list. Now that we have an AOP rule ready to go, let's create a new sales order for the customer to whom the rule pertains and see how the system handles it. Let's go to the Task bar's Add menu and open a new Sales order.
Since the AOP rule applies only to Agassi Enterprises, we will choose that customer from the dropdown. Now we'll skip down and enter an item for the sale. We won't assign a user in the Assigned to field or select an Order stage since both of these will be handled by the AOP rule. Now let's save the transaction.
To check whether the AOP rule we made is working, let's locate and open the order we created on the Sales orders list. Notice that both the Assigned to and Order stage fields are now populated, so the rule is executing these actions. The AOP rule also specified that a user be assigned to and notified of new sales transactions for this customer. By checking Notifications, we can see that the system has sent notifications that a sales order has been created and assigned to the user. And lastly, an email with a PDF of the sales order has been received at the email address specified in the AOP rule.
If you do a lot of shipments, a very helpful AOP rule is one that automates the creation of an invoice after a shipment. Let's create that rule and take a look at how it works in the system. First, we'll go back to the Company menu and choose AOP rule, then open a new AOP rule page. I've populated the fields here in advance. The rule has a unique name and description, and the Enabled box is checked. For this rule, the selected conditions are when a Sales order is Shipped. Create a new transaction with Invoice as the specified transaction are indicated on the Do this table. That's all that needs to be done for this AOP rule, so now we can Save and close.
Now let's test out the rule. Go to the Sales orders list. On the order we created, select Create shipment on the sales order's Actions menu. The shipment transaction is accurate as is, so we will simply Save and close. On the Sales orders list, notice the sales order's Shipments and Invoices columns. They show that the system created both the shipment and the invoice, so the AOP rule functioned properly.
This concludes our tutorial on Enhancing workflow with AOP rules. Thank you for watching this presentation!