If your company has established relationships with a set of preferred suppliers (for everything from your raw materials - if you're a manufacturing establishment - to office supplies) you might use "blanket orders" to keep a steady stream of supplies coming in.

 

Suppose your organization consumes 300 reams of paper per quarter, but you are not interested in having that much paper stacked away in your offices. You set up a standing purchase order ("blanket order" - as it is sometimes called) with your office supplies vendor to order 25 reams per week. The supplies come in each week until it is time to issue a new PO for the next quarter.

 

Well, conveniently, your supplier is able to take orders via email, so you set up NetMailBot to send the weekly email for the order of 25 reams of paper.

 

Naturally, with NetMailBot's database connectivity abilities, you can greatly expand on this simple idea. Suppose you have an internal supplies ordering system on your corporate intranet. People throughout the organization can visit the system to place orders for all kinds of items by quantity, supplier, part numbers, order dates, requested delivery dates, etc. These data are stored in a database, and, after being approved by the appropriate purchasing manager or controller, can be used by NetMailBot in scheduled, recurring email transmissions to all of the applicable vendors for all standing orders. Those orders that are not flagged as approved in the database are not processed. You could also keep track of your actual use of materials, and throttle your blanket orders accordingly (for example, you only used ten reams of paper this week, so you don't need another 25 next week). NetMailBot can send customized emails automatically based on whatever database query you give it!