Running Epicor Kinetic? Test sales order automation on POs you already entered.

Today someone opens Order Entry, picks the customer, types the PO number and chooses a ship-to. Then comes a line for each item and a release for each date, or a quote pulled in as the starting point. The typing is quick. The checking is what takes the time: our part or theirs, the price we agreed, a date the floor can make.

For the test, AI reads copies of POs your team has already entered and writes each one up the way Kinetic holds an order, header, lines and releases, showing why it filled every field. It saves nothing anywhere. Your reviewer lays each draft beside the order your desk actually saved and marks the differences.

The PO number box. Customer Maintenance has a Check for Duplicate PO setting. With it on, Kinetic refuses a PO number that is already on another order for that customer, and the PO field becomes required. Buyers reuse numbers anyway, or send one PO for two ship-tos, so your desk has rules for it. The draft checks each PO number against the orders in your sample and names the earlier order a repeat matches, leaving the call (new order, change or copy) to a person.

Customer part numbers that teach the system. A Kinetic order line holds your part and revision beside the customer's own part number and revision. Epicor users who have traced it report that saving a line with a customer part number creates or updates the customer part cross-reference behind the scenes. A wrong match keyed today becomes the default on next month's order. So the draft shows which cross-reference entry it used on every line, and marks any match it had to infer, so nothing new is learned without a person's yes.

Ship-tos and one-time addresses. A job site or a one-off delivery address can go on an order as a one-time ship-to only if Allow One Time Ship To is checked on that customer in Customer Maintenance. Otherwise your desk sets up a new ship-to or calls the buyer. The draft picks a ship-to ID from your list when the address matches one, and labels the rest one-time or new, so your reviewer can see whether it followed the rule your desk follows.

POs that answer a quote. Epicor's own training material says a quote can become a sales order whole or line by line, and Order Entry can add a single line from a quote. That only helps if someone notices where the buyer's PO departs from the quote. The draft names the quote it matched and lists each line whose part, revision, quantity or price differs, before anyone pulls the quote in.

What your reviewer watches. Kinetic keeps an order out of the Fulfillment Workbench until it is marked Ready to Fulfill, which is how a half-checked order stays off the shipping floor. Each draft says whether it would be ready or what question it is waiting on. Your reviewer, often the order desk lead or whoever knows your Kinetic setup best, looks hardest at customer part matches, ship-tos and repeated PO numbers, because those three write back into your data.

A yes against the success criteria means new POs get the same drafts for about 30 days.

Each draft goes to a person on your desk who approves, fixes or sends it back before anything is saved in Kinetic. Approved orders get into Kinetic the way your Epicor admin chooses: keyed from the draft, or loaded with tools your company already licenses. The scoring sheet from the test stays in use all month.