How to automate email into Epicor Vantage and Epicor 9
Short answer
Monitor a shared mailbox, extract the order or confirmation details with a model, match them to Epicor customers, parts and POs, and post a draft through the business object services after a person reviews it. The goal is fewer keystrokes, not unattended order entry.
In many Vantage and Epicor 9 shops, customer POs, RFQs and supplier acknowledgements arrive as email attachments and are typed into Sales Order Entry, Quote Entry or PO Entry by hand. The same few people do it all day and mistakes creep in on part numbers and dates.
Email automation here means reading the message and attachment, working out what it is, finding the matching customer, part and open document, and creating a draft for a person to confirm. Done well, it removes the typing but keeps the judgement.
The older Epicor platform is forgiving about web service calls but strict about master data, so most of the work is matching the customer's wording to your part numbers and units.
What teams use it for
Customer PO to draft sales order
Read a PDF or spreadsheet PO, match customer part numbers to your parts through customer cross-reference, and create a draft sales order for review.
RFQ intake
Detect request-for-quote emails and create a quote shell with the requested parts and quantities, assigned to the right salesperson.
Supplier order acknowledgements
Read vendor acknowledgements, match to the open PO release, and propose updated promise dates for the buyer to accept.
Shipment notices and tracking
Extract carrier and tracking numbers from advance ship notices and attach them to the expected receipt.
Customer order change requests
Spot emails asking to change quantity or date and attach them to the matching order with a task for customer service.
Epicor Vantage / Epicor 9 integration surface
- Sales order, quote and PO business object web services (SOAP) for creating drafts with standard validation. Service names and methods vary by 9.0x release.
- Customer part cross-reference and vendor part data used to map external part numbers to internal ones.
- Business Activity Queries for pulling open orders, releases and customer lists into the matcher.
- Document attachments on orders, quotes and POs so the original email and file stay with the record, depending on your release and configuration.
- Service Connect workflows for file drop and scheduled processing if you prefer an Epicor-side orchestration.
How it works
- 1
Connect to the mailbox
Use IMAP or the Microsoft Graph or Google API against a dedicated shared inbox, not a personal one. Process each message once and keep a status.
- 2
Classify the message
Decide whether it is a PO, RFQ, acknowledgement, invoice, change request or noise. Route noise away quickly.
- 3
Extract fields
Use a model plus OCR for scanned attachments to pull customer, PO number, lines, quantities, prices, dates and ship-to.
- 4
Match to master data
Resolve customer, part, unit of measure and ship-to against Epicor. Anything below a confidence threshold is flagged, not guessed.
- 5
Create a draft and review
Post a draft through the business object service, or stage it in a review screen, showing the source side by side with the proposed entry.
- 6
Learn from corrections
Store the reviewer's fixes as new cross-references and per-customer rules so the same email layout works next time.
Example flows
Customer PO to draft order
Trigger: An email with a PDF PO arrives in the orders mailbox.
- Classifier tags it as a customer PO.
- Extractor reads header and lines.
- Matcher maps customer part numbers through cross-reference and checks prices against the contract.
- A draft sales order is created and an order desk user is asked to review it.
- The reviewer approves, and the original email is attached to the order.
Result: Order entry time drops to review time, and mismatched prices are caught before release.
Supplier acknowledgement update
Trigger: A vendor replies with a confirmation that has changed dates.
- System finds the PO number in the subject or body.
- Dates are extracted per line and compared with the release dates.
- A buyer sees the differences and accepts or rejects each change.
Result: Promise dates stay current without the buyer retyping them.
Keeping data on-prem
Email content often includes pricing and drawings, so many manufacturers do not want it sent to a public model. Run extraction on open-weight models and OCR on your own GPUs, reading from your mail server over IMAP or Graph with a restricted app registration. The matcher and review queue run next to Epicor on the internal network, and only the final draft goes through the web services. This keeps customer documents, pricing and part data inside your boundary, which also helps if you handle controlled technical data and must limit where it is processed.
Security checklist
- Use a dedicated mailbox with app-level access, and not a user's password.
- Scan attachments for malware before parsing.
- Never create released orders automatically. Drafts need a named reviewer.
- Treat email text as untrusted input and block instructions inside it from steering the model or the posting step.
- Retain the source email and attachment with the record for audit.
Ways to get it done
Use an off-the-shelf order capture or EDI-from-PDF service
Effort: About 2 to 6 weeks, with per-document fees.
High volumes of standard-format POs and a vendor that supports your Epicor version.
Build in-house with a model, OCR and the Epicor web services
Effort: About 6 to 12 weeks to reach reliable matching on your top customers.
You have developers and want control over matching rules.
Partner build with Netray
Effort: Pilot on one mailbox and one document type first.
You want on-prem extraction, a review screen and learning from corrections.
Pitfalls
- !Auto-creating released orders from email invites errors and fraud. Keep review in the loop.
- !Customer part numbers and units of measure rarely match yours, so build cross-reference maintenance in from day one.
- !Replies and forwarded threads confuse extraction. Strip quoted history first.
- !Prompt injection in email bodies can try to alter prices or recipients.
- !Scanned PDFs with tables need layout-aware OCR, or line quantities shift.
Frequently asked questions
Can Epicor 9 read emails and create orders by itself?
Not on its own. Epicor 9 has no built-in email-to-order feature, so you add a service that reads the mailbox, extracts the data and creates drafts through the business object web services, with a person reviewing before release.
How accurate is automated extraction of customer POs?
It depends on document quality and how many layouts you see. Clean digital PDFs from repeat customers can reach high accuracy, scans and odd layouts much less. Use confidence thresholds so uncertain fields go to a reviewer.
Should orders be created automatically?
Create drafts, not released orders, at least at first. Once a customer's layout and part mapping have proven stable over many orders, you can relax review for that customer alone and keep price and quantity checks on.
Where do attachments end up?
Ideally attached to the Epicor order, quote or PO through its attachment capability, or in a linked document store with the reference stored on the record. Check what your release and configuration support.
Can this run without a cloud AI service?
Yes. Open-weight extraction models and OCR hosted on your own GPUs can read mail from your server and post to Epicor internally, so customer documents never go to a third-party model.
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