Advanced Shipping Notice - An Advanced Shipping Notice (ASN) is the electronic notification you send customers telling them exactly what's coming, when it's arriving, and how it's packed - down to which items are in which box on which pallet.

Blanket Purchase Order - A Blanket Purchase Order (BPO) is a long-term agreement where buyers commit to purchasing products or services over time - usually a year - with predetermined pricing or volume commitments.

Customer Part Number - The product code your customer uses in their system, which almost never matches the SKU in yours. Every order that arrives needs translation from their language to yours before it can hit your ERP.

EDI 850 - EDI 850 is the electronic data interchange standard for purchase orders - basically how businesses send orders to each other without drowning in emails and PDFs.

Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) - Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) automates order entry from large retailers and manufacturers, eliminating manual data entry for those specific customers.

Invoice - An invoice is a commercial document that itemizes a transaction between a supplier and buyer, showing what was delivered, when it was delivered, payment terms, and how much is owed.

Minimum order quantity - The smallest quantity of a product—or total order value—a customer must meet to place an order. Companies set MOQs to ensure order profitability, but manual enforcement means violations either slip through to fulfillment or require time-consuming customer callbacks.

On Time in Full (OTIF) - On Time In Full (OTIF) is the percentage of customer orders you deliver complete and on schedule. It's that simple - and that brutally honest.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) - OCR is the technology that converts images of text - PDFs, scanned documents, even photos - into actual editable, searchable text that your systems can understand.

Order Automation - Order automation is the use of software to handle the entire order-to-fulfillment process without manual data entry - from receiving customer orders through EDI, email, or portals to pushing them directly into your ERP or order management system.

Order entry is the process of extracting data from a customer's purchase order and getting it into your system so you can actually fulfill it. For most manufacturers and distributors, this means someone manually typing from emails, PDFs, and spreadsheets into the ERP—eight to fifteen minutes per order, every order, all day.

Order Fulfillment - Order fulfillment is everything that happens between a customer clicking "buy" and them actually receiving their stuff. It's receiving the order, picking products from the warehouse, packing boxes, creating shipping labels, and getting packages out the door. Simple concept. Absolute nightmare in practice.

Order to Cash - Order to Cash (O2C or OTC) is the entire business process from when a customer places an order until you've got their payment in your bank account. It covers order management, fulfillment, shipping, invoicing, collections - basically every step between "we want to buy something" and "thanks for the money."

Order Validation - Order validation is checking incoming orders to ensure everything is correct, complete, and actually possible before you promise something you can't deliver.

Purchase Order Acknowledgement - A purchase order acknowledgement (POA) is a document confirming that a supplier has received and can fulfill a customer's purchase order. It's basically the supplier saying "yes, we got your order and here's when you'll get it" – except in practice, it's rarely that simple.

Purchase Orders - A purchase order (PO) is basically your customer's official way of saying "yes, we want to buy this stuff from you." It's a document that lists what they're ordering, how much, at what price, when they need it, and where to send it. Think of it as a legally binding shopping list that triggers your entire fulfillment process.

Sales Order - Your company's internal document that records a customer's purchase request and authorizes fulfillment, inventory allocation, and invoicing. It's the translation of your customer's purchase order into your ERP system's language—mapping their part numbers, pricing, and shipping details to your internal records.

Sales order processing - The complete workflow that transforms a customer's purchase order into validated data in your ERP—from initial receipt through data entry, validation, credit check, and approval for fulfillment. It's not one step but a sequence of handoffs where orders move from inbox to warehouse-ready status.