5 Ways to Speed Up Customer Order Processing
Customer order processing is incredibly time-consuming. When you’re dealing with an ever increasing amount of orders that all require manual validation and data entry into your ERP, 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 processing orders. Here are 5 ways to improve the way you process orders:
1. Standardize the Capture of Orders
You can’t start processing your customer orders until they’re officially in your ERP system. So what’s your process for getting them there? Whether you’re receiving orders in the mail, over the phone, by fax or EDI, you’re depending on your customer service team to get everything right.
By standardizing the methods for capturing orders, you can ensure orders are never lost or misplaced. Take the time to standardize all the methods by which you receive orders and you improve the probability of not losing or misplacing orders for processing.
Automating the capture process for orders as they come into 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.
2. Standardize a Customer Order Form
Orders often come in the form of a PO from your customer which you can’t standardize, but you have contract information in your ERP to validate order information against. What about orders that you receive that aren’t PO’s? Your online order form may be different than your mail order form, your fax order form or the internal form you use when you talk with a customer on the phone to take an order. If crucial information is left out on any of the forms, that can hold up the process.
Take the time to standardize your order forms to match each other, and you’ll find that customer order processing becomes easier – no matter how that order is collected. Less mistakes will be made when the information is entered from the order form into the ERP system and an added benefit will be that it is easier to train new customer service employees who enter orders into the ERP. It will also make it easier to automate ERP order entry once you get to sales order entry automation solutions. That’s where auto entry entry errors are eliminated all together.
3. Automate the Process From Start to Finish
If you’re doing everything you can to get orders into your system quickly and accurately, but still aren’t meeting your desired metrics for accuracy and speed, consider sales order automation. Technology can speed up order processing quite a bit, handling time-consuming administrative duties including automatic data entry from PO’s and order forms so your employees can focus on more important customer service tasks.
With sales order entry automation, email, fax and EDI systems are automatically monitored for inbound orders and paper-based orders and PO’s can be captured for robotic validation, approval and entry into your ERP.
Advanced automation solutions compare information with your ERP, allowing them to automatically cross reference part numbers, confirm prices, and quantities while managing other parts of the order entry process like credit approval. Mismatched or invalid information allows CSR’s to focus on resolving only those incorrect items, allowing the automation solution to robotically process the other orders and order information. This prevents mistakes, mis-shipments and other errors, leaving the CSR to focus on providing service to customers.
The whole order process improves with automation, including advanced solutions that use machine learning to remember corrections on future orders when corrections are made to historical orders, meaning less time fixing orders in the future. Teaching your automation solution translates to faster and more accurate order processing.
4. 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 for example, in addition to credit checking, certain orders may need to be reviewed by engineering, quality control, or several other departments before you can confirm pricing or verify fulfillment 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 or forward them by email. But, there’s always the chance that the paperwork or email 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 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 and information they need, when they need them. Documents can be processed simultaneously or asynchronously. When one person is done with their task, the most up-to-date version of the order and the information associated with it goes directly to the next step – and so on until that order is fully validated, approved and entered into the ERP for fulfillment.
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.
5. Keep Documents and Information Together 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 burden on your staff.
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 order that includes all of the documents and information associated with that order, including the 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 increase your cash flow and reduce your DSO.)
Get Expert Advice for Faster Customer Order Processing
Ready to manage your order entry process more effectively? IntelliChief can help. We offer automated order entry processing solutions that can streamline your entire order-to-cash process.
Contact us today to find out if sales order entry automation is right for you. Or, to see how other customers have improved how they process orders with IntelliChief, visit our Resource Library for a peer-to-peer case study.