Ciena Corporation Extracts Key Data from Purchase Order PDFs within Minutes and Automates the Digitization Process

Ciena Corporation, a leading networking products and services provider, was facing challenges with the time-consuming process of manually extracting data from PDF purchase orders and feeding it to their in-house custom application. This manual data entry was laborious and prone to human errors, leading to delays in the sales transactions. The company receives customer requests for its products and services in the form of a Purchase Order via multiple methods, including emails. Order and account managers use these POs to create sales orders and initiate related business processes to complete the customer request. These POs are generally in PDF format and comprise of key information, such as customer name, price, currency, total value, parts, addresses, and more. Since every customer uses a different structure and layout for the PO, Order Managers have to read these files and enter this data manually into their ERP system to initiate a sales order transaction.

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 1500+ customers worldwide that issue purchase orders (PO) regularly for Ciena’s products and services. Ciena Corporation utilizes Astera ReportMiner to extract unstructured data from purchase order PDFs and move it through various tools for creating sales orders.