How to Outsource Purchase Order Updates in Infios (Without Losing Control)
A practical guide to handing off PO updates in Infios to an external team — what to document, what to keep in-house, and how to measure quality.
Outsourcing PO updates in Infios is one of the highest-leverage moves a furniture retailer can make — and one of the easiest to get wrong. Here's how to do it without losing the visibility and control that buyers depend on.
What to document before you start
- A list of every vendor you order from, with their ACK turnaround and document format quirks
- Your PO numbering convention and how SOs (sales orders) are tied to POs
- Which fields in Infios must be updated when an ACK arrives, in what order
- How exceptions are escalated — discrepancies, vendor non-responses, line-item splits
- The reports buyers run weekly that depend on PO data accuracy
What to keep in-house
- Vendor relationship management and negotiation
- Final approval on PO creation (the trigger event)
- Decisions on cancelling, splitting, or re-issuing POs
What an outsourced team should handle
- Daily ACK reconciliation against open POs
- ETA updates as new information arrives
- SCRUB report comparison and discrepancy logging
- Daily summary report of changes made and exceptions flagged
How to measure quality
Three metrics worth tracking from week one of any pilot:
- Update lag — hours between ACK arrival and Infios update. Target: under 24 hours.
- Error rate — discrepancies between what was entered and what the source document shows. Target: under 1%.
- Exception escalation time — minutes between an outsourced team finding an issue and the right in-house person knowing about it. Target: under 4 business hours.
If those three numbers are healthy in week one, the engagement will be healthy at month six. If they're not, the playbook needs adjustment before scaling up scope.
