Something I learned early on was the necessity of communicating with clients in the way that works best for them.

Some prefer email, while others prefer phone calls or texts. Whatever works.

Once, long ago, I had a dealer who preferred to communicate by fax machine. The fact that I didn’t have a fax machine made that challenging. He had to fax our office in Vancouver, and my assistant had to scan the faxes and email them to me for review.

Other than that one far-out example, most of the time using whichever means of communication my clients prefer is simple, direct and easy.

It’s the same when it comes to placing orders. Most dealers prefer to place their orders online on our dealer portal. Conversely, many others — for various reasons — find it easier to generate purchase orders in their systems and email them to me.

And I’m a big fan of both. The only thing better than logging into SAP and seeing that a big order has hit the system is having a big purchase order hit my inbox. It’s like having your birthday.

I like receiving purchase orders so much that I don’t even mind the extra work that comes along with manual POs.

What extra work, you ask? Well, I’m so glad you asked.

Some of the purchase orders I receive from clients have individual quirks that I’ve come to recognize, so I review them and make notations for the people on our order desk so everything is clear.

One quirk that comes to mind is that the legacy computer system one of my clients uses doesn’t recognize hyphens.

I don’t know why that is, only what it means: Their vendor part numbers don’t match my vendor part numbers. Ours can have anywhere between one and five hyphens.

So when I get one of their purchase orders, I have to copy and paste all the part numbers from the PDF into a new worksheet and manually add the hyphens back in.

I do this to make life easier for my team at the order desk. They have to process a lot more orders in a day than I do. Their jobs are harder than mine, so it’s a small thing I can do to reduce their stress.

Speaking of hyphens, something happened to me last week that hadn’t happened before.

I got a PO by email from a client, and all the part numbers had hyphens. But when I copied and pasted them into SAP to check stock and pricing, they came back as “not found.”

The first part number that came back like that I figured was just a typo, with a wrong digit.

But then they were all like that.

It took an embarrassing amount of time to find the problem: all the part numbers on that PO used the long “—” hyphen, known as an em dash. All of our part numbers in SAP use the short “-” hyphen.

Fixing the problem took less time than identifying it in the first place.