In practice it is three distinct problems that get sold as one. Extraction reads the document. Matching resolves what the customer wrote to what you sell. Validation decides whether the result is safe to act on.
Extraction is the most visible and the least difficult. Matching is where the value is, because a customer's own part number or free-text description has to resolve against your item master. Validation is where the risk is, because a confidently extracted, confidently matched line with the wrong unit of measure is a wrong order that looks correct.
Why it matters on an order desk
Evaluating one of these products on extraction accuracy alone measures the easiest third of the job. Ask what happens to a line it cannot resolve.
Related terms
- Sales order automationSales order automation is the conversion of an inbound customer order — usually an emailed PDF, spreadsheet or email body — into a sales order in the seller's ERP, without a person re-keying it.
- Touchless processingTouchless processing is the share of orders that pass from receipt to ERP without any human intervention, and it is the headline metric most order-automation vendors report.
- Item masterAn item master is the authoritative catalog record in an ERP defining every product a distributor sells, including its SKU, description, units of measure, pack sizes and pricing basis.