The Sales-Fulfillment-Collections connection is the main engine of all companies. It’s the cash flow lifeblood, and that’s why ensuring that orders are processed quickly and accurately is one of your primary objectives. You also need the ability to optimize your business processes to reflect your changing realities, and configure these improvements through automation to process more customer orders more cost-effectively.
IntelliChief ECM helps you improve your order processing, reducing order-to-cash cycle time and DSO’s by eliminating paper bottlenecks throughout your organization, with interdepartmental automation.
IntelliChief provides you the ability to:
- Effectively capture and content index all order documentation, in all paper-based and electronic file formats (including interdepartmental fulfillment notations throughout each order cycle) and organization for each transaction
- Receive real-time data verification with your company’s enterprise resource management (ERP) and line of business applications, assuring each transaction’s contractual accuracy
- Provide Customer Service staff with current information on client accounts
- Send Order Acknowledgements via email or fax without user intervention
- Accelerate order fulfillment by automating departmental approvals, currently slow due to manual distributions, gaining order processing visibility throughout each transaction
- Collect payments in a timely fashion, enhancing cash flow
- Thorough progression analytics and reporting of each order
- Reduce costs associated with paper: invoice retrieval from filing cabinets, copying documents, updating log books, lost orders due to documentation capture ineffectiveness, and significant storage space requirements.
Tangible cost-saving results:
- Increasing fulfillment – increasing your order throughput by 50%
- Accelerating operations – streamlining your processes of interdepartmental workflow by 80%.
Automated Sales Order Processing
Customer Orders sent via fax, email, or mailed in can all be captured by IntelliChief, eliminating the need for manual sorting and distributing.
Here is how it works:
1. Capturing Incoming Orders
- When orders are received via fax, IntelliChief captures them and places them in an electronic workflow queue. IntelliChief will use your business rules to electronically forward the orders to the appropriate person or group.
- With orders that arrive via email, users can capture the order by “printing to IntelliChief,” meaning they will send the email or attachment to IntelliChief’s electronic image archive using IntelliChief’s Print Capture Driver.
- Orders that arrive via mail are scanned into IntelliChief, so that electronic workflow can do the task of routing them to the appropriate person, eliminating manual handling of paper orders.
- Backup documentation (quotes, change orders, designs and diagrams) that accompany an order can be captured in IntelliChief with the Print Capture Driver allowing you to keep all relevant documentation easily accessible.
2. Distributing Orders
- As sales orders need to follow certain policies, IntelliChief’s Workflow Engine will automate the work of distributing orders to the appropriate person or group based on the set rules.
3. Order Entry
- As orders are keyed into your ERP system, IntelliChief re-indexes the imaged sales order thus ensuring it can be easily retrieved at any time, both from IntelliChief’s search screen and your ERP’s Order Inquiry screen.
4. Order Acknowledgements and Shipment
- If your company sends out Order Acknowledgements to your customers, IntelliChief can automate the task of faxing or emailing them.
- When orders are entered into your ERP, the spool file can be captured and formatted into a professional-looking form that is automatically faxed or emailed depending on the customer’s preference. It is then stored in IntelliChief to be retrieved and re-faxed or emailed if needed.
- When your Shipping Department prepares shipments by printing out Pick Lists, Delivery Tickets, Bills of Lading, and other necessary shipping documents, IntelliChief can help by capturing those documents into the electronic image archive, thus guaranteeing easy access to shipping documents at any point in time.
- These electronic documents can then be routed via IntelliChief’s Workflow Engine directly to the Billing department which will then invoice the customer. No need to manually collect and send shipping documents across the company, saving you precious time to focus on your job.
5. Billing and Accounts Receivable
- Now that the sales order, the shipping documents and even the proof of delivery are electronic, your Billing Department doesn’t need to wait for all the paperwork to arrive before it invoices the customer. The process is streamlined by having these accounts receivable documents in electronic format.
- When the invoice is created, IntelliChief helps by faxing or emailing the invoice to the customer while also storing the invoice image into the archive.
- When checks arrive, they are scanned and indexed in IntelliChief to match the invoice. Since the documents are now electronic, there is no need to make copies or file them in filing cabinets.
- IntelliChief also helps when you need to retrieve the check or the invoice from the electronic archive. Directly from your ERP’s Payment Inquiry or Invoice Inquiry screen, you can pull up the check or invoice image to your computer monitor and verify the information.
- If you need to see related documents such as the sales order, the bill of lading, the proof of delivery, IntelliChief will display those documents on your screen with the click of the mouse.
