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Case Study
Ciena Uses Astera to Automate Purchase Order Data Extraction Process.
Digitization Time of Purchase Orders Brought Down From 1 Hour To 2 Minutes
Achieved 15 Times Faster Data Extraction
Background
Ciena Corporation is a pioneer in the networking industry, known for providing a full spectrum of networking services, software, and equipment to telecommunication companies. Having a market presence in over 35+ countries, Ciena empowers telcos to build scalable, adaptive networks for meeting evolving consumer demands. The company boasts a vast portfolio of more than 1500 customers worldwide that issue purchase orders (PO) regularly for Ciena’s products and services.
Use Case
Ciena receives customer requests for its products and services in the form of a Purchase Order (PO) via multiple sources, including emails. These POs are generally in PDF format and include key information, such as customer name, price, currency, total value, parts, addresses, and more, which need to be extracted to initiate a transaction.
The process of manually extracting data from PDFs was time intensive and delayed processing time for customer orders. After extracting data, it had to be manually crosschecked in the customer purchase orders database, which led to a lot of back and forth due to errors during data entry. Ciena wanted a platform that would allow them to automate the process and decrease manual effort.
Profile
Ciena Corporation is a leading networking products and services provider, catering to telecommunication companies across the globe.
Industry
Technology and Software
Use Case
Ciena wanted a solution for the time-consuming process of manually extracting and cleansing data from PDF purchase orders and feeding it to the in-house custom application. Ciena used Astera to automate data extraction of their purchase orders.
Results
With Astera, Ciena can now digitize purchase orders in approximately two minutes, which is 15 times faster than it was before.
Enter Astera
Ciena initially looked at three different data extraction products. After testing each option extensively, Astera was the undisputed champion.
As Astera offers a complete data extraction solution that is purpose-built, it helped Ciena to handle a range of unstructured data formats, including PDFs, PDF forms, TXT, PRN, RTF, DOC, DOCX, XLS, and XLSX. Astera combined rule-based data extraction with an enterprise-grade ETL engine to help Ciena streamline their ETL process to liberate data trapped in unstructured files.
Astera has enabled Ciena to automate its entire process by fetching PDF files directly from emails, extracting the required text fields into XML, and sending it to POCollaborator for fact-checking and validation. Ciena leverages Astera’s template-based extraction feature that enables users to reuse the same report model for POs coming in from existing customers. As for new customers, the company utilizes features, like Pattern Match, to search important text fields, especially within lengthy PDFs, and quickly create templates for future use.
After implementing Astera, Ciena now digitizes purchase orders in approximately 2 minutes, which took 30 minutes to a few hours before. The digitized PDFs come out to 15 times faster data extraction process, enabling account and order managers to push through customer requests far more efficiently. Ciena Corporation relies on Astera capabilities to automate PO digitization, enabling it to create and process sales orders accurately in a matter of minutes.
Authors:
Iqbal Ahmed
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