Background
Ciena Corporation is a pioneer in the networking industry, known for providing a full spectrum of networking services, software, and equipment to telecommunication companies. Having a market presence in over 35 countries, Ciena empowers telcos to build scalable, adaptive networks for meeting evolving consumer demands. The company boasts a vast portfolio of more than 1,500 customers worldwide that issue purchase orders (PO) regularly for Ciena’s products and services.
Use Case
Ciena receives customer requests for its products and services in the form of a PO via multiple sources, including emails. These POs are generally in PDF format and include key information, such as customer name, price, currency, total value, parts, addresses, and more, which need to be extracted to initiate a transaction.
We have been using Astera, Azure Form Recognizer, and PDF Focus. But once we started implementing Astera, we found the product to be most flexible in terms of its capability compared to others, and we are pretty much not using other products at this point.
The process of manually extracting data from PDFs was time-intensive and delayed processing time for customer orders. After extracting data, it had to be manually cross-checked in the customer purchase orders database, which led to a lot of back and forth due to errors during data entry. Ciena wanted a platform that would allow them to automate the process and decrease manual effort.
We use Astera for pure automation. And with that automation, obviously, you get all the benefits of speed and accuracy.
Enter Astera
Ciena initially looked at three different data extraction products. After testing each option extensively, Ciena found Astera to be the undisputed champion.
![Ciena Corporation [Centre-Image.png]](https://images.ctfassets.net/70swyd24gsug/2raGtIbMK7MO04uCzUwU96/8bf2e7370c71de2e5cc94663a4bce257/Centre-Image.png?w=1440&q=85&fm=webp)
As Astera offers a complete data extraction solution that is purpose-built, it helped Ciena to handle a range of unstructured data formats, including PDFs, PDF forms, TXT, PRN, RTF, DOC, DOCX, XLS, and XLSX. Astera combined rule-based data extraction with an enterprise-grade ETL engine to help Ciena streamline their ETL process to liberate data trapped in unstructured files.
Astera’s capability to search specific content within the document is amazing. We found it pretty easy, and also it has the ability for more complex processing. With some of the other tools, you aren’t able to track or find data easily because it was the way it was embedded in the document. This is one of the things that makes it powerful for doing any kind of targeted data extraction.
Astera has enabled Ciena to automate its entire process by fetching PDF files directly from emails, extracting the required text fields into XML, and sending them to POCollaborator for fact-checking and validation. Ciena leverages Astera’s template-based extraction feature that enables users to reuse the same report model for POs coming in from existing customers. As for new customers, the company utilizes features like Pattern Match to search important text fields, especially within lengthy PDFs, and quickly create templates for future use.
With Astera, it only takes 2 minutes to digitize the PO, regardless of how long the PO is. That’s where Astera creates an impact on our processes.
After implementing Astera, Ciena now digitizes purchase orders in approximately 2 minutes, which took 30 minutes to a few hours before. TThis works out to a 15 times faster data extraction process, enabling account and order managers to push through customer requests far more efficiently. Ciena Corporation relies on Astera's capabilities to automate PO digitization, enabling it to create and process sales orders accurately in a matter of minutes.