Improving Your SAP Sales Order Process Flow
Tired of your time-consuming, inefficient SAP sales order process flow? There’s an easy way to speed it up: IntelliChief.
We get it: Manually entering every single purchase order into SAP takes a lot of valuable resources – resource that you just may not have. Plus, not every transaction can be completed through EDI (your customers, for instance, just may not have the technology for it). You also have to worry about data entry errors, lost/duplicate orders, and communication delays.
If you need a better order processing strategy, automation may be the key. IntelliChief’s order management automation software makes your SAP order to cash process simple and stress-free (not to mention much more accurate).
SAP Sales Order Process Flow – The Traditional Way
Traditionally, you have to monitor each of your communication channels (email, fax, phone, and mail) to collect inbound orders. From there, you have to manually enter them into SAP, specifying the customer, item numbers (and quantities), and billing & shipping information. (This is most commonly done in your SAP CRM.)
Order Confirmation
From there, your CRM communicates with your APO to make sure each item is available to ship. Your APO collects warehousing information, availability dates, and shipping information, then creates an unchecked delivery as a preview of the actual order.
At this point in the process, you may decide to send your customers an order confirmation notice. If any of the items in their order are temporarily out of stock, you’ll likely let them know about a potential delay.
Order Fulfillment, Shipment, & Billing
When your fulfillment team has the order picked, packed, and ready to go, SAP changes the order from an unchecked delivery to a checked delivery. If cross-docking is involved, the system adds the information, and the order is processed through each of the receiving warehouses.
Once the order has been filled, SAP creates your inbound and outbound delivery documents. Your team will typically save these documents into your customer’s file in case they’re needed in the future.
Depending on your internal policies, you may send additional communications to your customer when their order has shipped (or is out for delivery). You’ll then pass everything over to Accounts Receivable, who can bill the customer for their order.
The SAP Sales Order Process Flow with IntelliChief
While SAP helps streamline these workflows on its own, there’s still quite a bit of work involved for your team. IntelliChief is designed to take the extra steps out of the process.
Our sales order processing software helps you automatically:
- Capture customer purchase orders
- Create corresponding sales orders
- Send the sales order to each of the various departments that are involved with fulfillment
- Capture credit memos
- Enter and process change orders
- Send out order updates
- Send invoices via email/fax
- Confirm each order’s payment status
- Provide increased visibility into the collections process
Plus, every document that’s created as an order is processed is automatically saved to a searchable archive. If a customer contacts you for an update, you’ll be able to see exactly where their order is and when it’s expected to arrive.
Smarter Order Management, Better Cash Flow
With a better approach to SAP order management, you’ll save both time and money, improving your organization’s cash flow and reduce lead time. You’ll spend less time on low-value order entry tasks, and your workflows will move more smoothly. Plus, increased visibility into each order’s status lets you make faster, more informed decisions and provide better support to your customers. It’s a smart solution all around – and you can learn more here.
Talk to the Experts in SAP Order Automation
When you invest in an automation solution for SAP, you need to have an experienced team on your side. As a trusted leader in SAP order automation, IntelliChief can customize your integration so you can make the most of your existing workflows. And because we’ve handled countless projects just like yours, we can take all the stress out of deployment.
