National Key-Free Day is on its way – and we’re here to celebrate!
At IntelliChief, we know exactly how frustrating – and time-consuming – it is to type everything into your various business systems. On July 27, 2018, we’ll be celebrating National Key-Free Day, a new movement that celebrates more efficient data management.
With so many recent advancements in AI and RPA, there’s really no reason for manual data management. Now more than ever, it’s a smart strategy to rely on software for data validation, entry, and form processing.
Every year, we’ll be setting aside the fourth Friday in July for National Key-Free Day, as we continue to celebrate the ongoing abilities of ECM. We’ve seen customers reduce their document processing time (and cost) by as much as 50 percent – a trend that’s well worth talking about.
You’ve run the numbers, looked at previous metrics, and realized that your DSO is higher than it should be. You may be seeing the impact on your day-to-day cash flow, or you could simply be trying to get ahead of future problems. Either way, you’re looking to reduce your DSO – and the following strategies can help you get there.
Step One: Set Realistic DSO Targets
In a perfect world, customers would pay right away. But, the reality is, most companies need several days – if not several weeks – to collect and verify their invoices, get approvals, and schedule payments.
If your current days sales outstanding is 90+, you won’t be able to get to 30 days overnight. A more reasonable initial goal is an improvement of 10-15 percent. That means reducing your DSO to 77-81 days if you’re currently at 90 days, or getting to 51-54 days if you’re currently at 60. Once you’ve met this initial target, you can re-evaluate your cash flow and decide if you still need to improve.
Step Two: Review Your Payment Terms
A typical guideline for accounts receivable management: your DSO should be within 15-20 percent of your stated payment terms. Once you’ve figured out how much you need to reduce your days sales outstanding, you can re-evaluate your payment terms to make sure they align.
When looking at your payment terms, you’ll want to look at more than just the period of time that your buyer has to pay the amount that’s due. You can also look at:
Early payment incentives (such as a 1 or 2 percent discount for paying within 10 or 15 days)
Late payment penalties
How you’re asking to be paid (electronic options let you access payments right away, instead of waiting several days for a check to come in the mail – although some of your customers might not be willing to adopt new technologies)
Step Three: Get Better at Credit Risk Management
Your payment terms go hand in hand with your credit practices – which are equally important to consider when you need to reduce your DSO. If you’re too lenient, you take on a greater financial risk – but if you’re too strict, you may be missing out on potential business.
When you review your credit policy, be sure to consider:
Your company’s overall financial risk tolerances
What criteria customers need to meet to be approved for credit
How you plan to process each application (e.g. using a third-party company for a B2B credit check, or requesting more references from new customers)
How you plan to resolve delinquent accounts (from preliminary communications through collections)
You’ll also want to consider whether credit policy changes could actually increase your DSO, rather than reduce it. For instance, if you add more paperwork or more extensive credit checks to your process, you’ll likely spend more time on accounts receivable management up front. However, if the time you spend on this step is less than the amount of time (and money) you’d spend dealing with delinquent accounts, it may be worth the trade-off.
And remember: you don’t have to decline business from customers you deem too risky. Instead, you can consider options like pre-payment, cash on delivery, or a partial up-front deposit.
Step Four: Improve Your Invoicing Practices
Once you know how you plan to reduce your DSO, you’ll need to communicate your new policies very clearly to your customers. That may mean updating your invoice template to put the due date and preferred method of payment front and center.
There’s also the issue of getting delivered to the customer right away. (After all, if your customer hasn’t received an invoice yet, there’s nothing for them to pay!)
If you currently wait for customers to receive their purchases before you send your invoices, you could start sending invoices after each order has shipped. You could also consider emailing your invoices to speed up the process even further.
There’s also the option of automating your invoices, but we’ll get into automation a bit further on.
Step Five: Improve Your Collections Practices
Even though most customers pay on time (and those miss the first deadline do usually follow through in the end), companies still need to have a documented debt recovery policy in place. This ensures that you know what to do in a worst case scenario (and that you spend as few resources as possible on the process.)
One of the most common customer responses on a collection call is “I never got that invoice, can you send it to me?” Employees then have to get off the phone, reprint the invoice, re-scan it, and re-email it out. Implementing an enterprise content management system can give the user access to the invoice while the customer is on the phone, and the customer can receive the invoice immediately. This allows the AR team an opportunity to come up with a payment plan for the customer right then.
For the most part, one or two friendly reminders are usually enough to get a customer to address an unpaid invoice. (Be sure to keep complete documentation of all your communication attempts – in the event that you do need to send the account to a collections agency, this will make the process smoother.) But, if multiple reminders go unanswered, it may be easiest to turn the account over to the pros. That way, you can go back to focusing on more financially valuable accounts.
Step Six: Increase Visibility
Reducing DSOs is a collaborative effort. Credit managers, financial analysts, and CFOs all have their own role in the process – and they all need real-time information to make more informed decisions.
An unpaid invoice report is a great place to start – but they’ll need to look much deeper to get to the bottom of your high days sales outstanding. Visibility is crucial; your team needs to know which customers are late to pay, whether there’s any correlation with your company’s sales patterns, and whether you’re doing anything internally to hold up the process. If you don’t already have a reporting process in place, consider investing more heavily in a system that’ll let you create a more accurate cash flow forecast.
Step Seven: Consider Automation for Effortless Accounts Receivable Management
At the end of the day, managing your receivables is a time-consuming process. Anything you can do to make it easier can have a positive impact on your cash flow.
AR automation is one way that you can speed things up. Instead of having an employee create invoices, confirm each company’s billing information, and print and send your paperwork, you can let an automated system handle everything for you.
Companies that automate their order to cash process are usually able to reduce their DSOs within a few months. Their customers get their invoices faster, don’t have to worry about duplicate charges, and spend less time contacting customer service. Internally, these companies can eliminate repetitive processes and free up their accounts receivable team to work on more important projects.
Let IntelliChief Help You Reduce Your DSO & Improve Your Accounts Receivable Performance
Ready to improve your approach to accounts receivable management? IntelliChief can help. Our business process optimization team can help you automate your most time-consuming workflows. We’ll recommend ways for you to reduce your DSO, increase your cash flow, and process your receivables with less effort from your team.
For JD Edwards customers, there’s a common goal of finding an automation solution that can integrate seamlessly with JDE EnterpriseOne or World.
But even still, what type of integrated solution will be best for your AP department? And is that solution the best strategic fit for your organization as a whole?
Join IntelliChief for a webinar exclusive to JD Edwards customers on the available choices for automating your AP processes. We’ll explain why an Enterprise Content Management (ECM) solution could be the most strategic fit, providing the most to gain.
We will not only cover the core concepts of OCR and data capture, workflow, analytics and mobile, but we will weigh the benefits of ECM for JD Edwards customers as a whole.
On average, companies that use enterprise content management software in their AP department report a 50 percent reduction in invoice processing costs. Even better? Many achieve straight-through processing rates of 75 percent or more, when dealing with purchase order-based invoices.
This all comes down to one thing: time-consuming manual processes becoming much more efficient with automation.
One such process? Data keying.
Getting Invoices Into your ERP
When you get an invoice, it has to make its way to your ERP. That could mean taking time out of an invoice processor’s day, just to type in every individual line or information. Or, it could mean feeding the invoice into your ECM solution, and letting technology do the rest.
IntelliChief’s Capture Enterprise makes the latter scenario possible. It actively collects all paper-based and electronic file documentation, then syncs it with your ERP. Designed specifically for organizations that are looking to automate their Accounts Payable process, it’s able to all but eliminate manual invoice matching, voucher creation and ERP data keying.
Here’s how it works.
Invoices received as paper documents, email attachments or other files are scanned or imported directly into Capture Enterprise. Information is extracted from the header, body and footer of each document. This information is then verified (the AI/machine learning capability) and validated, leveraging database look ups, defined business rules, calculations and defined confidence thresholds. The vendor information associated with each invoice is automatically identified, along with other critical information from line items and unstructured fields.
It even works on multiple-page invoices.
Eliminating Keying From Other AP Workflows
As a highly sophisticated AP automation solution, Capture Enterprise has built-in invoice validation features, allowing it to even two- and three-way match documents without user input.
Invoices that fail validations, fall below confidence thresholds, or fail the invoice match process can be reviewed and resolved immediately. Or, they can be routed through IntelliChief Workflow for exception handling. Non-PO based invoices can be routed for GL coding and approval.
After all invoice types have been fully matched, approved, coded or resolved, the data extracted and validated via Capture Enterprise for AP invoices will be delivered for ERP voucher creation.
This can substantially reduce invoice cycle times. Organizations that rely on it are better positioned to take advantage of early pay vendor discounts, or even negotiate more favorable terms with their suppliers.
Customer order processing is incredibly time-consuming. When you’re dealing with hundreds of orders at a time, it’s easy to feel like there’s no end in sight.
That said, there are quite a few ways for you to speed up operations. For instance, you can:
Standardize Your Order Forms
If you take online orders, your customers can hand-select everything they want. But, if they phone in an order, they’re depending on your team to get everything right.
Your online order form may be different than your mail order form, or the internal form you use when you talk with a customer on the phone. If crucial information is left out, that can hold up the process.
Take the time to standardize your order forms, and you’ll find that customer order processing becomes easier – no matter how that order is collected.
Automatically Capture all Customer Orders
You can’t start processing your customer orders until they’re officially in your system. So what’s your process for getting them there?
You may have streamlined EDI processes for your larger clients (perhaps around 20 percent of your base), but you can’t forget about the other 80 percent of customers whose orders are still being manually processed. In most cases, those orders that are faxed or emailed to your organization represent an even larger portion of your company’s revenue.
Automating the capture process for orders as they come in to your organization can eliminate lost orders, duplicate orders, and printing cost entirely. By capturing orders directly at the source, you can also reduce your lead time.
Automate the Process Entirely
If you’re doing everything you can to get orders into your system quickly and accurately, but still aren’t meeting your desired metrics, you can always consider sales order automation. Technology can speed up order processing quite a bit, handling time-consuming administrative duties so your employees can focus on more important tasks.
With automation, you can have your email and fax systems automatically monitored for inbound orders. Then, those purchase orders can be imported into your order management system to create a sales order for each customer.
Even with automation, customer order processing still requires employee input. Advanced solutions can compare information with your ERP, allowing them to automatically cross reference part numbers, confirm prices, and read quantities. But, when something doesn’t match or is incorrect, the program asks a customer service representative for confirmation. This allows CSR’s to focus on resolving critical errors (instead of monotonous tasks like order entry).
There’s also the benefit of machine learning. Once a CSR corrects an error, the software can remember that correction for next time. Teaching your system what you need translates to faster and more accurate order processing.
Make Multi-Department Collaboration Easier
It’s always nice to deal with stock items and returning customers. But, it’s not always that simple.
When you deal in made-to-order products, certain orders may need to be reviewed by engineering, quality control, or several other departments before you can confirm pricing or verify lead time.
Getting these multi-step orders from department to department is often easier said than done. If all the necessary departments are in the same location, you can print the orders out and take them where they need to go. But, there’s always the chance that the paperwork gets misplaced, forgotten, or buried in a pile of other requests. If you want to go the email route, you can save a bit of time, but you end up with a cluttered inboxes and requests that often get missed.
Automation can save you time here as well. It’s possible to set up electronic workflows for customer order processing, giving each team access to the documents they need, when they need them. When one person is done with their task, the most up-to-date version of the document goes directly to the next step – and so on until that order is complete.
This takes the “tribal knowledge” out of customer order processing. (For instance, certain employees may know exactly what the process is for a specific order type, even if it isn’t part of your company’s documentation.) And, because you’re standardizing the process, you’re able to capture data for reports and analytics that show you how you’re doing in real time.
Keep Streamlined Records for Better Customer Service
Your job doesn’t end when an order is shipped. Your team still deals with customer inquiries and collections, putting even more on their busy to-do list.
To help keep customers and auditors happy, you’ll want to keep your records as organized as possible. Ideally, you’ll have a complete archive of every purchase each customer has made and a history of every event in the order process. (Even better if that archive is electronic and fully searchable.)
This lets you tell customers what stage of the order process they’re in at any point in time. It also helps you proactively communicate issues, like out-of-stock items, to keep your customers informed. (As an added bonus, your collections team will also have access to the entire history of a transaction, including invoices, to help reduce your DSOs.)
Get Expert Advice for Faster Customer Order Processing
Ready to manage your orders more effectively? IntelliChief can help. We offer automated order processing solutions that can streamline your entire order-to-cash process.
Contact us today to find out if automation is right for you. Or, to see how other customers have improved their order processing workflows with IntelliChief, visit our Resource Library for a peer-to-peer case study.
/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/IntelliChief-Paperless-Process-Management.png00Faith Kubicki/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/IntelliChief-Paperless-Process-Management.pngFaith Kubicki2018-07-18 14:46:062018-08-14 17:10:23Five Ways to Speed Up Customer Order Processing
Human Resources and Human Capital Management are among the most document intensive areas of your organization. You have everything from employee applications to contractor 1099s – and more coming in every day.
Enterprise content management is a valuable resource that lets you be…well…more resourceful.
With ECM, you can automate the information processing activities that your HR department faces every day. At the same time, every record is organized for quick, secure electronic access and long-term archival. It’s a long-term, low-cost approach to managing your HR resources.
Five Ways to Improve Your Approach to Human Capital Management
HR automation all starts with a solution to capture information and re-purpose it for your organization’s business processes. Once this is complete, password-protected access & keyword serach features let you access anything you’re looking for from a desktop or mobile device. And then, workflow automation lets you route documents to managers, contractors, and other decision-makers for prompt action.
Ready to get started? You’ll want to think about:
Consolidating documents from every format. HR managers have to deal with both paper-based and electronic documents. You need a solution that can uniformly format & convert paper documents to electronic files with minimal input. From there, that system needs to organize your documents based on specific criteria – giving you a single, searchable system for document storage.
Validating data quickly and with minimal effort. The more quickly you’re able to get information off your paper files (and ensure that it’s correct), the lower your HR costs. And when your documents are stored electronically, the cost of on- and off-site paper file storage is reduced or eliminated.
Integrating your new solution with your Human Capital Management software. The most effective systems can sync data with your HCM database or ERP. This way, you only have to process information once – and it’s automatically updated from there on out.
Improving your interdepartmental workflows. This puts the “enterprise” in ECM. HR connects multiple departments, and often involves frustrating information silos. A solution that can help you route your documents, secure approvals, and increase visibility can significantly streamline your internal procedures.
Protecting the integrity and long-term accessibility of your records. If a disaster were to occur, what would happen to your company’s records? Archival is imperative to business continuity through temporary & catastrophic occurrences. It even protects against inadvertent misplacement.
The Need Identified
According to Forester Research,“Human Resources departments typically use 50% of their staff’s time handling manual, mostly paper-driven personnel administrative tasks.”
As the impact of Human Capital Management continues to expand, you and your staff are losing half your time to non-strategic tasks. Your company needs you to focus on more critical contributions. To make this happen, you need to become more resourceful – and IntelliChief is here to help.
Your order to cash cycle determines how quickly you process your orders, how soon you get paid, and how much money you can re-invest in your business. A long cycle is a sign that you’re not operating as efficiently as possible. This can be frustrating – especially if you’re already using Oracle to manage your workflows. But with a few strategic changes, you can produce better metrics. One way to improve your order to cash cycle in Oracle? Order entry and sales order processing automation, made possible by IntelliChief.
Oracle Order to Cash Overview
Any processes that occur after a customer has sent a purchase order fall under the “order to cash” umbrella.
In Oracle, the order to cash cycle starts when you enter a new transaction into your Order Management Sales Order module. At this point, you can also:
Enter custom pricing and tax information
Apply discounts
Update a customer’s payment information
Update a customer’s shipment information
As you move from order entry to order fulfillment, you’ll also move to the Shipping Execution module. You’ll:
Put the requested items on hold
Create a pack slip
Set departure dates
Set up secondary shipments for backordered items
Calculate weight, volume, and fill percentages for your logistics team
Assign freight charges
Define container details
Once the order has shipped, Oracle notifies your customer. You can then use the Order Management module to track the delivery and manage returns.
Billing, which is done in Oracle Receivables, is the last step of the order to cash cycle. You can use the Receipts Workbench, Transactions Workbench, and Collections Workbench for the final O2C workflows. In these modules, you’ll enter receipts, create and send invoices, post payments, and add transactions to your general ledger.
Automating Key Steps in Your Oracle Order to Cash Process Flow
With so many steps to complete, it’s easy see where delays can occur. Many companies have issues routing orders and receipts from one department to the next. This is especially true for complex orders that move through Engineering, R&D, and Quality before they’re eventually sent out.
While you can’t automate the entire order to cash cycle in Oracle, you can streamline the most time- and labor-intensive steps. In fact, you can even have certain processes completed without any input from your employees, thanks to robotic process automation. An example: you can have IntelliChief send new orders straight to Credit, without Customer Service having to manually pass them along.
Our order to cash solutions communicate behind the scenes with your Oracle ERP. In doing so, our system can automatically:
With IntelliChief, you’re able to keep your existing workflows in place. (For instance, you can have your customers continue emailing, faxing, and mailing you their orders.) But, with automation helping you out, you can avoid the routine administrative work that’s needed to move each order through to completion.
For O2C processes that do need a user’s attention, automatic notifications also make sure nothing falls through the cracks. When nobody is stuck wondering what they’re supposed to be doing, your orders are completed faster and with fewer mistakes.
Benefits of an Automated Order to Cash Cycle in Oracle
Automating your Oracle workflows with IntelliChief helps you significantly reduce your order to cash cycle times. You can start processing each order right away, instead of waiting for a customer service member to enter them in. And, you can send invoices as soon as an order is complete, avoiding collection delays that complicate your cash flow.
Automation also helps you scale your order to cash processes without having to hire new employees. The teams you already have in place can take on new (and more valuable) work as well.
Another benefit: any time you need a document while you’re working in Oracle, you can retrieve it through IntelliChief. You don’t have to switch over to a different screen, helping reduce disruptions so that you can stay productive. Similarly, when customers reach out with questions, you can access their entire order history directly from your app. Customer service becomes much faster and less of a burden.
Discover IntelliChief’s O2C Solutions for Oracle
IntelliChief is designed as an end-to-end O2C solution. This means that you can use it to streamline as much of the process as you like. You can start with one specific area – like sales order management. Or, you can automate the entire Oracle order to cash process all at once. And, with the detailed reports that IntelliChief collects, you can visualize key ways to improve operations throughout your entire organization. This includes everything from supply chain management to inventory management.
Ready to improve your order to cash cycle in Oracle? Contact IntelliChief today. Our experts can review your O2C workflows and introduce you to our Oracle document management solutions. We’ve helped countless E-Business Suite users just like you leverage the power of automation – and we’ll use that extensive technical knowledge to your benefit throughout implementation and beyond.
/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/IntelliChief-Paperless-Process-Management.png00Faith Kubicki/wp-content/uploads/2015/06/IntelliChief-Paperless-Process-Management.pngFaith Kubicki2018-07-12 08:00:562019-04-08 15:24:20Improving Your Order to Cash Cycle in Oracle
IntelliChief is bringing a detailed discussion of JD Edwards AP & order processing automation to the Packerland RUG’s Summer Event. We’ll be at he Tuscumbia Country Club in Green Lake, WI, on July 19th, sharing our strategies for EnterpriseOne & JD Edwards World productivity (made possible through ECM.)
An Oracle Gold Partner, IntelliChief will present Fiscal Fitness for JDE: Today’s AP and Orders Automation Abilities.
Our experts will be addressing the latest approaches to back-office automation. Throughout the day, we’ll be sharing how-to’s and benefits of this technology stack trend.
