Session Notes: Order Entry Process — End to End

2026-06-01 · Megan Calloway + Nate St. Pierre

Overview

This session was a walkthrough of Merrick Awards & Engraving's wholesale order entry process, from the moment a purchase order arrives via email through to the point where an order enters production. Megan screen-shared and walked Nate through the actual workflow in Ordova Advance, the company's order management system. The conversation also covered the company's relationship with Ordova, the role of the outsourced team that currently handles order entry, and a few specific friction points in the process.

The session was intentionally exploratory — less an interview and more a show-me-how-it-works observation. Megan was candid about what she thinks is and isn't improvable, and realistic about the limitations of the OMS.

The Wholesale Channel: How Orders Work

Merrick Awards & Engraving operates in the promotional products industry as a supplier to distributors. They don't sell directly to end users. Instead, distributors search the industry distributor catalogs for items that fit their customers' needs, find Merrick listed as a supplier, verify the product details and pricing, and then bring an approved order back to Merrick. At that point, the distributor sends Merrick a purchase order along with artwork files — and the order entry process begins.

Once an order is complete, Merrick manufactures the product and ships it — often directly to the distributor's end user, but in packaging that appears to come from the distributor. Merrick functions as their behind-the-scenes manufacturing partner.

Distributors who work with Merrick regularly already understand what they need to provide (proper artwork files, complete PO details) because they're industry professionals. Megan noted this makes the wholesale channel different from retail, where a customer might send incomplete or incorrect files and need more hand-holding.

The Shared Inbox and Order Routing

All incoming orders come into a shared Outlook mailbox (orders@...). Multiple people have access to this inbox, and it's organized using categories that correspond to different tasks and different team members. When an order comes in, it gets tagged appropriately so the right person knows what to do with it.

Right now, order entry and back-end artwork processing are tagged for an outsourced vendor. That team handles the initial entry of orders into Ordova and the processing of artwork files. The vendor arrangement is winding down — after which, this work comes back in-house.

Order Entry in Ordova Advance

Megan walked through a sample order to show how entry actually works. The example was a small name badge order from a university (eight pieces for Houston City College, placed by a distributor called Urban Circle).

When an order comes in, the first step is looking up the customer in Ordova. If they've ordered before, the standard approach is to clone a previous order from that customer. Cloning copies over the basic order structure — the same product configuration, artwork references, and most of the standing details — so the team isn't starting from scratch every time. From there, the fields that are specific to this order get filled in or updated.

The fields that need to be populated for each order include:

• The distributor's purchase order number
• Shipping details (address, shipping method)
• Ship date and in-hands date
• Event date, if applicable (some orders are time-critical because of graduation ceremonies, conferences, or similar events)
• Product and component details

That last item — product and component details — has some complexity. A finished product like a name badge isn't a single line item in Ordova; it's made up of multiple components. The example Megan showed had three: the magnet for the back, the packaging, and the white plastic substrate that gets sublimated. Each component is a separate entry in the order record.

Artwork is also attached directly to the order record. Files come in either as email attachments (EPS or PDF) or via a Dropbox link included in the PO. They need to be downloaded from wherever they arrive and uploaded into Ordova — there's no direct transfer.

The Artwork Handoff

Once an order is entered, it goes to the art department for proofing. At Merrick, Carla handles both order entry and art, which Megan said is fairly typical for this industry. Carla takes the order and the submitted artwork, creates a proof, and passes it back to order entry. From there, the proof goes out to the distributor, who routes it to their end user for approval.

When the proof is approved, the order's status changes from orange to green in Ordova, and the workflow status updates to "in production." That's the signal the production floor uses to begin work.

Sourcing

Before production starts, there's also a sourcing step: checking whether the components needed for the order are already in stock or need to be ordered from a vendor. For high-volume items like name badge components, Merrick typically keeps inventory on hand. If something needs to be ordered, a purchase order goes out to the vendor, and the items get received and checked in when they arrive.

The Ordova Relationship

Megan gave significant context on the history with Ordova Advance. Merrick signed a contract with them five years ago, but didn't go live until two years ago — a gap partly explained by the pandemic, but also by the fact that Ordova's out-of-the-box capabilities didn't fully match Merrick's use case. Ordova is built primarily for screen printing and embroidery shops; Merrick's printing technologies required custom development work before the system could handle their production floor properly.

Even now, Janet — a key team member — is still spending roughly 20 hours a week optimizing the product setup in Ordova. Getting all of Merrick's products configured correctly in the system has been an ongoing, multi-year process.

The vendor relationship is complicated. Merrick has a dedicated success rep, but feature requests and support tickets often move slowly. At one point, they paid Ordova directly — a "kickback," as Megan put it — to prioritize a set of critical onboarding needs. It helped, but the relationship remains sticky and the system is deeply embedded in how the business operates.

Megan's overall assessment: Ordova is more than halfway decent, and it mostly works. She wouldn't want to switch. But it was built for a slightly different industry, and the compromises are real.

Friction Points in the Current Process

Copy-and-paste from PO to Ordova. The core order entry task — reading the incoming purchase order and manually keying all of its information into Ordova — is entirely manual. Every field has to be transcribed by hand. Megan described it as "a bunch of copying and pasting."

File download and re-upload. Because Ordova is web-based, any artwork file that comes in via email has to be downloaded to a local device before it can be uploaded into the order record. It's an extra step that doesn't add value but can't be skipped. Megan mentioned that even Microsoft Power Automate might handle this, but she doesn't know how to set it up.

Art edits. When an artwork file needs to be revised, the process is: download the file from the order record, make the edit on the local device, save it, re-upload it to the order, and then re-tag it. Megan counted it as roughly 10 clicks per revision. She doesn't think there's a good solution to this — it's a consequence of how Ordova stores and retrieves files — but she named it as a real friction point.

Quality Control

QC at Merrick happens at the front end of the job, during setup and proofing. By the time an order is in production, it's past the point where an error can be cheaply corrected. Management sign-offs are required for certain orders — based on the complexity of the project, the dollar amount, or the experience level required. The sign-off process is meant to catch problems before they get to the production floor.

Megan's framing: "It's still cheaper to find the problem before you ship it."

Production Module

The Ordova system has a separate production module that the production floor team uses. Their view is organized differently — by machine rather than by order — and is entirely separate from the order entry and account management view. When an order clears proofing and sourcing, it appears in their queue and they work from there.

Follow-Ups

• Get 3–5 sample POs from different distributors to understand how much the format varies
• Clarify who specifically will handle order entry in-house after the outsourced vendor departs
• Find out if Megan has any existing documentation of the order entry SOP or edge-case rules
• Confirm whether Ordova's API supports order creation (writing new orders, not just reading)
• Power Automate for file routing — Megan flagged it as something worth setting up; she just needs guidance