Microsoft .NET Server Solutions for the Enterprise

Purchase Order Reception Solution

The whole point of a supplier publishing their catalog to a trading partner is to generate sales. The trading partner needs to present the supplier's products to its customers so that those customers can purchase them, resulting in the trading partner sending a purchase order back to the supplier. Not only is it important for a supplier to receive purchase orders, but also they need to fulfill the orders in a timely manner and bill the appropriate party. Any reasonable purchase order reception solution must take this into account.

The purchase order reception solution provided by AFS can be divided into the following areas, each of which is discussed in its own sub-section:

• Supported document formats. Whenever documents are exchanged electronically between two parties, the format of the documents is obviously something upon which both parties must agree. This section discusses the purchase order document formats supported by AFS.
• Tasks. Receiving purchase orders involves a number of different tasks, some of which are performed once, or at least only occasionally, and some of which are performed routinely. This section discusses both types of tasks.
• Architecture. The purchase order reception architecture of AFS uses BizTalk Server and Commerce Server and, as is frequently the case with the .NET Enterprise Servers, SQL Server behind the scenes. This section provides a high-level look at this architecture and how purchase orders flow through the architecture from the trading partner to the supplier's order processing system.