Improving Your Order to Cash Cycle in Oracle

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.