# How to automate email into Plex Smart Manufacturing Platform > Source: https://netray.co/integrations/plex-email-automation > Publisher: Netray (netray.co), AI and integration engineering for ERP and manufacturing systems. > Section: Integrations ## Short answer Read the shared mailbox with Microsoft Graph or IMAP, classify and extract fields with a model, match to Plex customers, parts and orders through its APIs, and create draft transactions for a person to approve. Auto-post only when confidence and rules allow. ## System Plex Smart Manufacturing Platform ## Capability email-automation ## Intro Customer orders, release schedules, RFQs, supplier acknowledgements and invoices still arrive as email, often as PDF or Excel attachments. In a Plex plant that means a customer service or purchasing person retyping values into customer orders, releases, or receipts. Automation here is mostly a matching problem. Reading the email is easy. Knowing which Plex customer, which part number, which revision and which open order it refers to is the hard part, and it is where wrong automation causes real damage: the wrong ship-to, a duplicated order, a misapplied price. The sound pattern is capture, extract, match, propose and approve, with automatic posting reserved for narrow, well-proven cases. ## Use Cases ### Customer PO to sales order **Description:** A purchase order PDF from a repeat customer is parsed, the part numbers are matched to Plex part records and customer part cross references, and a draft customer order is created for review. ### Customer releases and forecasts **Description:** Weekly release spreadsheets are compared with open releases in Plex, and only the differences are proposed, which cuts review effort. ### Supplier order acknowledgements **Description:** Replies with confirmed dates update a proposed promise date on the matching PO line, flagged when the date slips past demand. ### RFQ intake **Description:** Quote requests are logged with drawings attached, matched to the customer, and routed to estimating with extracted quantity and due date. ### Vendor invoices to payables **Description:** Invoices arriving by email are extracted, matched to PO and receipt, and queued as a draft with variance flags. ### Certificates and ship notices **Description:** Supplier certs of conformance and ASNs are attached to the right receipt or lot in Plex for quality review. ## System Surface - Plex REST APIs and Data Source API (DSAPI) for looking up customers, parts, open customer orders, POs, receipts and supplier records; names and scope depend on release. - Write paths for customer orders, releases or receipts exist through APIs or through Plex's own import/EDI features depending on your configuration; validate which one your tenant supports before designing posting. - Plex Document management or attachments for storing the original email and file against the record; confirm API support in your version. - Customer part cross reference tables, which make or break part matching accuracy. - Mailbox side: Microsoft Graph with application permissions limited to a shared mailbox, or IMAP with OAuth, plus a dead-letter folder for failures. ## How It Works ### Connect the mailbox **Detail:** Use Graph with a scoped application access policy so the app can read only the intended shared mailbox. Move processed mail to subfolders instead of deleting. ### Classify the message **Detail:** Decide whether it is a PO, release, RFQ, invoice, acknowledgement or noise. Use rules for known senders and a model for the rest. ### Extract fields **Detail:** Pull header and line fields from the body and attachments. Keep the original text span or page for each value so reviewers can verify quickly. ### Match to Plex **Detail:** Look up the customer by sender domain and PO format, parts by cross reference and revision, and open orders for duplicates. Return candidates with scores, not a single guess. ### Create a draft and queue for review **Detail:** Present extracted values beside the source document. The reviewer fixes exceptions, approves, and the service posts to Plex. ### Close the loop **Detail:** Attach the source to the Plex record, reply to the sender if required, and record the outcome to improve matching rules. ## Example Flows ### Repeat customer PO **Trigger:** An email from a known customer arrives with a PDF purchase order. **Steps:** - Service classifies it as a PO and extracts lines. - It resolves customer part numbers through the cross reference. - It checks for the same PO number among open orders. - A draft order appears with a side-by-side view. - The CSR approves and the service posts it and attaches the PDF. **Result:** Data entry drops to review time, with an audit trail from email to order. ### Duplicate guard on release updates **Trigger:** A customer resends the same release file. **Steps:** - Service hashes the attachment and compares to prior ones. - It diffs lines against open releases in Plex. - If nothing changed it files the email and stops. **Result:** No duplicate releases and no wasted review. ## On Prem Plex is hosted, so email automation is a bridge problem. Mailbox content, drawings and customer pricing are the sensitive part, and they often involve controlled data in aerospace and defense. Run extraction on a local open-weight model on your own GPUs, keep the review queue inside your network, and send only the validated, structured result to Plex over its API. If your mail is on Exchange Online you are already in Microsoft cloud, so decide whether attachments may leave to any outside model at all, and default to no. For on-prem Exchange, use EWS or IMAP from inside your network. ## Security - Restrict mailbox access to the specific shared mailbox with an application access policy. - Keep drawings and customer pricing off public model APIs unless your compliance office approves. - Require human approval for any financial or ship-to change. - Store the original email and attachment hash as evidence on every created record. - Quarantine messages with executable attachments or spoofed senders before parsing. ## Options ### Use Plex's EDI or import features **Fit:** Customers who can send structured EDI or files instead of email. **Effort:** Customer onboarding effort, little coding. ### Off-the-shelf intelligent document processing **Fit:** High volume of standard documents and a team that wants configuration, not code. **Effort:** Weeks, plus ongoing template tuning. ### Custom pipeline with a partner **Fit:** Varied customer formats, on-prem model requirements and tight Plex matching. **Effort:** Pilot on top three customers, then widen. ## Pitfalls - Cross reference tables in Plex are often incomplete, so match rates start low until cleaned. - Auto-posting from unreviewed extraction creates duplicate or wrong orders that are painful to unwind. - Email threads carry quoted old messages; extract only from the newest content or you will read stale data. - Revision letters on drawings change meaning, so do not drop them in matching. - Currency and unit of measure mismatches are common between customer documents and Plex part setup. ## Faq ### Can Plex read emails by itself? **Answer:** Not as a general purpose feature that I can confirm. Plex supports structured data exchange such as EDI and APIs, but parsing free-form email and PDFs is normally done by an external pipeline that then submits clean data through Plex's interfaces. ### How accurate is extraction? **Answer:** It depends on document quality and how consistent the customer's format is. Expect high accuracy on clean repeat formats and lower on scans or odd layouts. Use confidence thresholds and a review step, and measure the correction rate per customer. ### Should it post to Plex automatically? **Answer:** Begin with drafts and review. After a customer shows a sustained very low correction rate, you can allow automatic posting for that customer under rules, such as no price change and matched parts only. ### What about attachments with drawings? **Answer:** Store them against the record and keep them inside your controlled storage. Do not send controlled drawings to external services. A local model can read the title block for part and revision when policy forbids outside processing. ### Does this replace EDI? **Answer:** No. EDI is better when a customer supports it. Email automation fills the gap for customers who will not, and it is usually the long tail where most manual keying lives. ## Search terms plex email automation, plex purchase order email, automate customer orders plex, plex email to sales order, plex rfq email automation, plex invoice email processing, plex smart manufacturing email, plex order entry automation, plex email parsing api --- Talk to an engineer: https://netray.co/contact?intent=erp_ai | Machine catalog: https://netray.co/agent/catalog.json