Chris Tucker

Monsen Innovation Award - 2021

Vice President of Information Technology
San Jose, CA

• One of the tasks that some of our customer service reps must perform weekly is entering sales orders to bill for consignment usage.  Chris tested his automation magic on the consignment customer with the most stable process and website.  The process has built-in safety measures that ensure the pricing is accurate, inventory is sufficient, and each order is not a duplicate. Testing was successful with 100% of the consignment orders entered and billed in P21 using a Bot.  Some time was saved, but the real benefit was the learning process and the final template that resulted. The template will save Valin hundreds of hours of manual input per year.
• Sales orders from a recent acquisition were imported into Valin’s system without issue. However, most of the prices on the sales orders were edited and a price edit notepad had to be added to each line. Chris designed a Bot within a few minutes to add an edit notepad to over 700 lines that had edited prices. It would have taken approximately five days to enter the information manually.
• At a Friday morning meeting, it was mentioned that a recent price increase had caused price edits that had to be entered into notepads for each of the 1,000-line items with the information available by Monday. Chris was given a file that contained the necessary information. In 30 minutes, he designed a Bot to update the system. The Bot worked over the weekend and completed the task on time. If this task was performed manually, it would have taken over a week to complete and be susceptible to human errors.
• A large consignment customer regards each pull as an individual event. Historically, Valin combined all the consignment pulls into a few large orders each week.  While this process saved time for the customer service group it added a lot of time and extra effort to the accounts receivable staff.  Using the knowledge and template from a test customer Chris designed a process that allowed each pull event to be entered and invoiced, by a Bot, as an individual sales order. This allows the A/R staff to apply the cash more accurately and efficiently.
• A primary supplier provides shipment confirmation via a nightly email. The buyer enters the tracking information from the email manually to update the purchase order in P21. Chris designed a process where the email is converted into a readable format for a Bot, and it updates the correct line on the purchase order in P21. If the correct line on the purchase order is not located an email is sent to the buyer notifying them of the issue.
• Valin is currently experiencing unprecedented price increases from its suppliers.  Keeping P21 pricing up to date with the latest prices is a very labor-intensive process.  This process is hampered because several suppliers do not provide electronic price lists.  The Pricing team worked with Christo to design a Bot that logs into the supplier website or portal, enters the part number, locates the price and any other pertinent information. It copies information and formats it so that the Pricing team can use to update the item records in P21.
• To keep Valin’s website competitive Chris designed a tool that goes to competitors’ websites and pulls valuable information for the eCommerce team to analyze.

About the Monsen Innovation Award
The Monsen Innovation award recipients are recognized for their outstanding accomplishments and dedication to our company.  The inspiration for this award (and the first award recipient) was Jon Monsen. Jon F. Monsen, Ph.D., P.E., was a control valve technology specialist at Valin for many years. Jon wrote a book titled, Control Valve Application Technology, Techniques and considerations for properly selecting the right control valve. This book was published by Valin and is currently sold on our ecommerce site. Monsen possessed 35 years of industry experience and lectured nationally and internationally on control valve sizing and application.