Unlock Efficiency with an Amazon Invoice Example for Manufacturing

Amazon invoice example for Manufacturing

[Music] hi everyone my name is abhishekayor and I'm a senior software engineer in the consumer payments organization and I've been with Amazon for about nine years my team Will's payment experiences and services for business customers in this talk I will introduce how businesses receive invoices from Amazon the technical challenges that we faced in this area how we solve them using the invoice document framework and launch critical features for customers and then I will finally conclude with our learnings from solving these challenges let me first introduce what an invoice is and how businesses use it an invoice is traditionally a document given by the seller to the buyer to in order to collect payment this is called paying by invoice and is similar to how we pay for our phone or utility bill business customers also want PDF documents when a payment is made using a payment method like a credit card and sometimes also want electronic invoices sent to their preferred accounting and Reconciliation systems in some countries business customers also want these documents to be tax compliant which is a record of how much tax was collected for a transaction so why do businesses need these invoices the most important benefit of an invoice is the ability to keep a legal record of sale this makes it possible to find out when an item was sold who bought it and who sold it to track payments and invoices an invaluable tool for accounting it helps both the seller and the buyer keep a track of their payments and amounts owed it's also useful for Easy Tax filing and recording and maintaining all sale invoices which helps the company report its income and ensure it's paid the right amount of taxes in 2020 we had a number of teams generating independent invoice documents with separate business logic and separate systems it required considerable amount of effort investment to ensure data consistency across these invoice copies even though they were for the same transaction launching new projects required coordination across teams for quality assurance and development slowing down project delivery essentially we had a bottleneck on our hands we realized that there was a need to build a central system for assembling data that is used for financial documents that multiple teams can use and extend with a set of technical requirements for the system we wanted to build number one system should be able to support multiple types of documents for example data from the Frameworks should be usable for generating PDF documents e-invoices as well as customer facing reports second system should be able to support generating documents that are used for multiple purposes like a document that's used for tax compliance as well as a receipt system should follow local tax compliance regulation provide a detailed audit of which component produce what data and have a mechanism for verifying invoice accuracy we also realize that one team cannot handle all the use cases we needed to become an enabler for multiple teams to innovate on behalf of customers through a Federated model we built the invoice document framework which is a Federated data composition framework for financial components in this framework teams came together and agreed on a shared data model and decide which team is responsible for what data for example Team 1 could provide address data and Team 2 could provide tax data we provided an ability for teams to build Federated plugins for Gathering data customizing data and validating the data on the invoices along with this we also had to build a dynamic plug-in execution graph to determine execution order based on inputs and outputs of each plugin the final output data produced by these plugins was then used to generate a customer facing PDF or electronic invoice now what were the results we were able to deliver critical company-wide goals saving hundreds of weeks of coordination effort and processing costs for customers since we had developed a Federated execution model we were able to resolve bottlenecks and allow teams to launch projects that unblock key features for customers and most importantly we were able to generate invoices accurately and efficiently now what were the lessons that we learned through this entire process number one we started with the pain points for the customer and internal teams to inform what we should build we respected what came before although we were able to drive alignment that re-architecting the system has a lot of benefits we always respected existing systems that were tested and have been working for years it is critical that when a new system is built it doesn't break the functionality provided by the existing system we used goals as invoicing was distributed across multiple organizations it was really important to align multiple teams with goals to ensure delivery we track detail customer and business metrics to measure impact and make sure that the projects we were taking on made a difference to the customer and not just improved the architecture given the limited time I have touched on just one aspect from all the exciting work going on in consumer payments like securely storing payment method information for millions of customers to enabling diverse payment experiences for businesses and consumers and like we say at Amazon it's still day one for our team check out our career page in the description box below for open positions and thank you for taking the time to watch this presentation foreign [Music]