Oracle Email Delivery — Why Schrödinger’s Cat Matters

Erwin Schrödinger, an Austrian winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics back in 1933, had an interesting theory that just may be important to your email delivery from Oracle EBS.

In a simplistic form, Schrödinger stated that if you place a cat in a box, then sealed the box closed for a period of time, you essentially would not know if the cat was dead or alive until the box was opened.

Sending emails—like your time-sensitive invoices and POs—from Oracle’s Delivery Manager is pretty much the same.  While Oracle may report that your email was a “Success,” you really have no idea whatsoever whether it reached its destination.

Did someone on the other end really receive that invoice keeping your company’s cash flow moving? Did the intended recipient really lay eyes on your PO ensuring that your organization will have the items needed to function properly?

Is Schrödinger’s cat alive or not? 

Did you get my email?

Because of this lack of insight from Oracle’s “Success” status, senders are, unfortunately, stuck waiting to see if their invoices get paid. However, the whole time the email was never delivered—it was caught in a spam filter or it bounced back to a mailbox that is not monitored.

When the invoice doesn’t get paid on time, senders are required to pick up the phone and call your customer to ensure everything is ok with the payment. The customer says, “I never received the invoice.” Now the employee has to manually resend the invoice via email or, even worse, print the invoice and send it via snail mail to the customer. Then your invoicing department has to constantly check with the customer to ensure the invoice was received.

Unfortunately, this process can take up hours of following up with customers and resending emails while resulting in a delayed payment.

A similar scenario can arise for POs. If your PO doesn’t get delivered your operation can come to standstill while the PO is resent.

So what can you do about it?

Fortunately for your invoices and other important documents, and apologies to the cat, advanced tracking methodologies now exist so you access the status of your emailed document at nearly any point in time.

By delivering your documents through AventX, you can embed tracking mechanisms to any outbound email you send through Oracle EBS. This technology allows the sender to know with a large degree of accuracy whether the email was received, if it bounced (and why!), and if it was clicked or opened.

This level of detail allows Accounts Receivable Managers to monitor invoice delivery proactively and, ultimately, deliver better cash flow to the organization.

By accessing insights into which invoices did not reach their destinations or, more importantly, which invoices were ignored, your AR team can be more targeted with their follow up to your customer.

Supplementing Oracle with AventX delivery technology allows AR teams to be more informed about every email delivery and more targeted with their follow up to customers regarding missing or late payments.

It also provides the information you need to maintain a more accurate email database. By reporting bounced emails with detailed information, you can ensure that you have an accurate email address for every invoice.

So, before you fire off your next customer invoice or purchase order, consider what that “Success” status really means. There’s a chance you’ll be following up in a day or two to confirm that it was received. But with the right technology in place, you’ll know more about your email delivery than Schrödinger knew about his cats.