Why Upgrade Your Manual Sales Order Processing System

Manual sales order processing can threaten your company’s productivity, efficiency, and bottom line

Manual sales order processing can threaten your company’s productivity, efficiency, and bottom line. Manual processing is not only time-consuming but can also be prone to errors. If you automate the entry of sales orders into your ERP today, you will see processing time and accuracy improve immediately and benefit from its ROI.

What is a Manual Sales Order Processing System?

A manual sales order processing system is an outdated process of dealing with customer orders utilizing physical documentation, spreadsheets, or separate electronic tools such as email or voice calls. Manual sales order processing involves human action at every level of the order process, such as receiving, documenting, verifying, filling, invoicing, and collecting on customer orders. The major characteristics of a manual sales order processing system are:

  • Physical order forms, POs, or Excel spreadsheets to enter orders into an ERP
  • Manual data entry of order details in separate systems, such as ERP and CRM
  • Verbal or email communication across departments for order exception handling and approvals, resulting in no visibility to the status of orders received but not yet entered into the ERP
  • No real-time order entry process updates, so information tends to lag or become out of sync
  • Increased likelihood of mistakes in order entry, like incorrect quantities, prices, or shipping information
  • Limited or no management oversight or metrics to measure the efficiency and effectiveness of the order entry process, hampering management from making strategic improvements

What Is Order Management Automation?

The sales order management process starts when a customer places an order, continues through order fulfillment, order delivery, and ends with the invoicing and collection of cash for that order.

Sales order management automation is the set of software tools used to streamline and improve the process of validating and entering an order into an ERP system while tracking it through invoicing and collection. Improving sales order management process efficiency and accuracy of orders entered into your ERP has a widespread impact on your organization and customer relationships.

By automating the entry of orders into your ERP, the order entry process is streamlined, and orders are processed more efficiently and accurately, allowing faster fulfillment and an improved collection cycle, eliminating delays often caused by a manual sales order processing system.

Enhanced Efficiency and Speed

One of the greatest benefits of automated sales order management is enhanced operational efficiency. Manual sales order processing tends to encompass redundant data entry, paperwork, and communication between departments. These inefficiencies can cause bottlenecks and delayed order fulfillment. By using a digital solution, companies can:

  • Automate repetitive tasks, such as data entry and order confirmations
  • Combine sales channels for real-time capture of orders from ecommerce sites, CRMs, or marketplaces
  • Eliminate the manual work required by an ERP to validate and generate a sales order in the ERP
  • Decrease order processing and shipping turnaround time

The outcome is a more rapid, streamlined sales cycle that enables teams to concentrate on enhancing the sales order process and value-added tasks.

Improving Order Entry

Your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is the source for managing all your sales orders. Unfortunately, if your customer service team is still manually keying orders from documents and POs received from customers, there is no visibility into orders that have been received but not yet entered into the ERP. There can be accuracy and timeliness gaps between received and fulfilled orders.

Intelligent sales order entry automation helps improve the entire order entry process. With this technology, most sales orders are validated and entered into an ERP system automatically without human intervention. For orders that do require manual handling, resolution is streamlined, and mistakes are prevented by AI-enabled robotic processing engines.

For orders requiring pre-approval, for example, for credit authorization, the automation system routes them to the right approver, sends real-time alerts to ensure timely handling, and offers a centralized dashboard for management oversight, speeding decisions and enabling faster fulfillment with improved customer satisfaction.

Manual processing sales orders into an ERP and human errors are eliminated. Automated cycle will improve your sales order process efficiency and accuracy results through improved fulfillment and collection times. This empowers your customer service team with more time to address and improve customer satisfaction by focusing on value-adding tasks.

Compliance and Audit Readiness

For industries with strict regulations, accurate record-keeping is important. An electronic sales order system creates an automatic audit trail for not just each sales order transaction, but each step performed in the sales order management process. That includes the date and time for each approval and other task performed in the process. This allows for complete compliance and easier audits. Benefits include:

  • Creating detailed reports in seconds, which makes the auditing process faster.
  • Electronic records mean that each step is documented and traceable, promoting accountability and eliminating the potential for errors or fraud.
  • Receiving alerts for missing documents or compliance violations, and avoiding issues before they occur.
  • Compliant practices that instill confidence in customers, suppliers, and partners improve your company’s reputation.

Entering Orders Into Your ERP System

With IntelliChief’s AI-enabled, ERP-integrated sales order entry automation solution, customer order documents and POs are automatically validated, matched to contractual information contained in your ERP, and converted into sales orders within your ERP.

Whether orders or POs are received by EDI, email, fax, or paper, our customized solution can automatically and accurately import order details into your ERP to create a sales order.

Our robotic automation platform scans each document and collects the line-item details of part numbers, prices, quantities, shipment, and billing information to validate and import directly into your ERP.

This eliminates the inefficiencies of a manual sales order processing system, allowing your system to automatically kick off the customized workflow for your business to process an order, including credit checking, pricing validation, which leads to faster and more accurate fulfillment.

Eliminate Order Processing Delays

IntelliChief’s order management solutions integrate with ERPs in real-time, which means orders received are automatically validated, matched, and entered into the ERP without delay or manual data entry of important information.

Our AI-enabled solution never calls in sick, would never go out on vacation, or make mistakes because it was out too late the night before. That’s why, as soon as an order is received by a customer, even during off-hours, the order details are captured, validated, and processed, and the sales order is created in your ERP, without the delay caused by having to wait for manual entry.

Eliminate Order Entry Errors

When you’re not entering each order by retyping the information from a PO or order document into your ERP, you don’t have to worry about data entry errors.

Your customers get exactly what they ordered (at the correct price, and in the correct quantities), and your customer service team doesn’t have to deal with angry customers who receive the wrong order. Allowing the rest of your customer service team to get back to providing great customer service.

Integration Across Business Functions

Enhancing the sales order management process frequently means integrating various departments, including sales, customer service, sales order operations, accounting, credit, warehouse, and logistics.

Digital platforms can consolidate all these functions into one system, improving sales order process efficiency. Cross-functional integration results in:

  • Enhanced team communication and collaboration.
  • Breaking down data silos between departments.
  • Standardized information sharing throughout the organization.

As a result, companies are able to manage sales orders more effectively, provide improved customer service, prevent redundant work, and react better to changes in the market.

Specialized Sales Order Entry

Some orders are easier to process than others. If you specialize in made-to-order products, it’s even more important to have a streamlined approach to order entry..

With IntelliChief, unique orders can be processed just as easily as standard ones. Our solution can route change orders to the correct departments for internal review, ensure engineering sign-off, send credit check information over to finance, and even help you manage price discrepancies and other custom order compliance procedures.

All of the information and documents you need to process an order are automatically added to the order history, ensuring an audit trail of activity, compliance accuracy, and fulfillment performance metrics.

Full Order-to-Cash Support

As you move beyond sales order entry automation and look to improve customer service, providing fingertip access to all of the documents and information associated with an order, from receipt to payment, is crucial to delivering a quality customer service experience.

IntelliChief fully integrates with your ERP to automatically capture and index all of the documents and information in the order-to-cash (O2C) process.

Orders, POs, customs forms, credit authorizations, engineering approvals, shipping documents, delivery notifications, acceptance receipts, invoices, and cash payment confirmations are easily accessible from both your ERP and the IntelliChief platform, allowing for complete visibility into a customer order and an improved customer service experience.

You don’t have to search through the ERP for the documents and information a customer seeks or add documents manually; customer service staff have it all at their fingertips, reducing training costs.

If you operate multiple warehouses or fulfillment centers, this makes your O2C process much simpler and more powerful. Once your orders are received, all of the order information and documents are captured and made available to customer service staff to answer any customer inquiries on the status of orders.

Each customer’s order history/status is stored in an electronic archive, which your staff can easily access at any time, right from the ERP or from the IntelliChief archive, eliminating delays in answering customer inquiries on the status of orders.

Sales Order
Automation

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