WooCommerce purchase order workflow with Atum

Retail customer with dozens of vendors required digitizing their existing paper based purchase order workflow with seamless integration to WooCommerce’s inventory and order management.

Atum Stock Manager plugin was selected as a basis providing solid purchase order management functionality, but it proved to be cumbersome during customer order handling as separate browser tabs had to be kept open for updating items individually into vendor specific purchase order lists.

Solution was a extending the WooCommerce’s standard customer order management view with new controls for adding and updating the product levels and notes directly into vendor’s pending purchase order.

This way the purchase order pre-processing happens fluidly during every day customer order handling in the WooCommerce’s standard order management views, and Atum’s custom purchase order views are utilized only during sending and processing the incoming purchase orders.

Implementation involved leveraging Atum Stock Manager plugin’s public HTTP (REST) API and PHP API methods on the backend, connected to a HTML5/AJAX form hooked into customer order line items.