In the third quarter of 2008, we were asked by Group Transportation Services, a logistics company that specializes in LTL shipments, to automate one of their existing order entry procedures. They regularly receive orders from a few of their customers via email. The emails contain an attachment that is received and processed internally through their order entry system. After processing, an acknowledgement email is sent back to the customer. The processing time for this workflow was generally two to three days, due to the human interaction that was required. We automated this process using Mule ESB and reduced the time to less than ten seconds.

Mule components were developed and configured to accept emails from a specific email account, add database records that constitute an order, and then send the response email back to the customer. The first component strips off the attachment from the email message and delivers it to the order entry component. The database records are inserted and then another component creates and delivers the response email back to the customer, within seconds of receiving the order request.

This process saves GTS time and allows them respond very quickly to customer requests. It was a small fix with a very positive result.