A Customer submits a Purchase Order via fax. The fax is picked up by a Sales Assistant, who makes three photocopies of the Purchase Order. One copy is filed, one is given to the salesman and the last is submitted to the Credit Manager.

The Credit Manager reviewed the Purchase Order and determined which customer account applied to the order. This former customer created separate accounts for the same customer based on payment terms. Still, no one could understand why customer sales reports were always filled with errors.

Now the Credit Manager determined if the customer had sufficient credit to order based on the payment terms. The Credit Manager also submitted the order to the Accounts Receivable factoring company that provided credit insurance for all orders.

If approved for credit and for insurance, the photocopied Purchase Order was then handed to the Logistics Manager. Please note, as of this moment, not one scrap of information has been entered into a computer. All requisite information has been hand written on the photocopied purchase order! The Logistics Manager now determines if the customer has any special shipping requirements or instructions and staples those instructions to the purchase order. If the order is supposed to ship within the next 30 days, the Logistics Manager submits it to the Operations Manager. Otherwise, the Logistics Manager files the paper purchase order in the appropriate shipping month.

The Operations Manager now allocates inventory to fulfill the order. Using a pen he marks which products are available for shipment and which must be backordered. Also, because he doesn’t trust the Logistics Manager, he double-checks for special shipping instructions.

Now that three different people have handled and written on the photocopied purchase order, it is finally submitted to the poor Data Entry Clerk who has to decipher everyone’s handwriting and input the order into the computer system. But wait, there’s more! The Data Entry Clerk prints out two Packing Tickets. She staples the original tattered Purchase Order to one and files the other. The stapled mess is then sent to the Warehouse Manager for fulfillment.