As automation has continuously revolutionized the manufacturing of all kinds of products, dealers  & resellers have lagged behind in management of customer orders for those products. Today, many still rely on the most antiquated manual processes for getting orders into their back-office systems.

Maintaining a high level of control over customer order document processing is always essential for business performance, but even more so during tough economic times in which the need to cut costs clashes head-on with high customer expectations. Dealers need to have a crystal-clear view of what is being ordered by whom and where each order is, and they need to be able to access customer order documents easily.

And of course, the more efficiently orders can be entered, the faster they can be fulfilled and the sooner the seller can receive payment.

Paper is so 20th Century 

Despite the availability of mature and proven technology to automate sales order processing, many companies still have customer service staff spending hours every day on activities like picking up, collating, distributing, entering and retrieving paper orders. Accuracy suffers from incorrect entry of orders, and dealers pay the price in returns, restocking, credit notes, write-offs, additional shipping costs and customer dissatisfaction.

Managing a paper-based sales order process is labor-intensive and time-consuming with little or no visibility into day-to-day activities. Orders, or parts of orders, can easily get “lost in the system.” Making a simple change to an order is often a source of frustration for both the buyer and the seller. When a customer sends in an order by fax or mail and then calls to make sure it was received, trying to track down the order (on the fax machine, at the printer, with a customer service rep or order entry clerk, entered into the ERP system, or any number of other possibilities) can throw an expensive wrench into the system. Certain orders may have priority over others but still go through the same first-in/first-out process. As a result, it is not uncommon for dealers to have order entry backlogs of several days. And a company must maintain order processing staffing at sufficient levels to handle all of the orders it receives.

When dealers look at the fact that their sales order process is manual and paper-driven, they see it not only costs money but takes time away from answering phones and entering new orders. Many companies have good customer-satisfaction initiatives centered on the overriding principle of making it easy to do business with them. Sooner or later they act on the knowledge that to support these initiatives they must quit paper. Only then can they free the necessary time for customer service to take more phone calls and enter more orders.

Proficiency at what cost?

By necessity, most dealers have become highly proficient at processing paper orders. But the cost is high — not only in operating expense (a paper order can cost as much as $60 to process and up to $200 to reprocess when there are data entry errors or documents get lost), but also in customer satisfaction. In short, using paper will only cost more and more money — while bringing no value to customer service.

Economic forces and new sources of competition are compelling dealers to address the dilemma of how to cut costs and improve customer service. With order volumes down and market share more precious than ever before, nearly everyone is looking to cut operating costs quickly and deeply. Forward-looking companies also know they need to be ready for the upturn with operational efficiencies that give them a competitive advantage. Along with the high cost of processing paper sales orders, dealers recognize the impact of paper on customer service. Today every order really counts, and dealers simply cannot afford to lose customers.

Hard cash

Today’s leading-edge automation technology enables companies to capture up to 100 percent of orders electronically — even including those received by fax and email. Along with bringing control to handling of exceptions such as blocked orders or invalid part numbers, preventing mismatches of customer and payment terms, and eliminating lost or misplaced orders, this reduces operational costs associated with paper orders by up to 70 percent, in large part as a result of minimizing the labor required for order processing. According to a recent study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of document process automation provider Esker, Inc., the Esker customer studied will save five million dollars in labor costs over three years, above and beyond savings from reduced paper consumption and document storage, by automating its sales order process. The same company immediately eliminated 12 fax machines dedicated to inbound orders.

Smaller companies achieve similar results through automation. Recalling the factors that drove his company’s sales order process improvement project, an Esker customer’s technical advisor said, “Our focus was to effectively remove the in-baskets. The cost and labor associated with paper was an obvious negative. But also, access to the data was all manual. So if customer service got a call with a question, they would have to call back with an answer after they found the documentation. A request to see the original order for confirmation would require pulling the file and copying, faxing or printing the pages — and sometimes all three.”

The most comprehensive automation solutions deliver the additional value of consolidating sales order processing on a single platform. Such a platform can eliminate the expense of maintaining the complicated mix of point-to-point systems for faxing, imaging, OCR, data capture, formatting, validation, workflow, exception handling, EDI, data conversion and archiving that is a common characteristic of dealers’ IT environments. And the same platform can be used for automated customer invoicing to optimize document processes throughout the order-to-cash cycle.

Soft savings

Automated sales order processing boosts productivity exponentially, multiplying the number of orders that can be processed per person per hour — which helps dealers avoid costs of recruiting, hiring, and replacing one of their most valuable assets: CSRs. For example, a leading global dealer of IT products saw benefits nearly immediately as a streamlining document processes. The number of sales orders it could process each day jumped by 20%, resulting in a similarly-sized boost in revenue. In addition, data input errors decreased significantly – and fewer errors ultimately mean more satisfied customers. Quitting paper leads to a better customer experience by enabling increased speed, responsiveness and customer care. Order entry accuracy can rise to virtually 100 percent with automation, resulting in less reprocessing and fewer returns that hit the bottom line hard.

Reporting capabilities of automated sales order processing solutions can also enable monitoring of vital metrics such as time and volume. Managers can see the number of orders that have been entered each day, how many have been received but not processed, how long ago each order was sent in, the amount of time it takes each CSR to enter an order, which customers are using correct product or pricing information and which are not.

Another way automated sales order processing saves dealers money is by reducing the cost of meeting service level agreements and assuring that orders get out on time. One of the most common outcomes of sales order process automation is to go from an order entry backlog to same day order entry. And as orders come in from customers in different markets and across geographic regions, they can be assigned a priority based on customer status, location, product, distribution point, and other parameters built into business rules that the automation tool uses to govern processing of sales orders.

In the areas of archiving and regulatory compliance, automated sales order processing solutions provide electronic archiving capabilities that lower the costs of off-site storage and data retrieval for auditing to satisfy requirements such as those of the Sarbanes-Oxley Act.

On premise or on demand

In an economic landscape where budgets are subject to the sharpest scrutiny, dealers and resellers have options to gain the operational efficiencies and customer service advantages of automated sales order processing within their objectives to lower capital expenses. Esker, for example, makes all the benefits of automated sales order processing available either as an on-premise server platform or as an on-demand service leveraging the capabilities of that platform without the up-front costs of implementing software.

The SaaS model offers immediate ROI with quick, enterprise-wide deployment of an easy-to-use tool to streamline the process of entering, approving, archiving and accessing sales orders — without adding IT complexity or maintenance costs. Companies also benefit from the platform’s capabilities to automate business processes throughout the procure-to-pay cycle in addition to order-to-cash, including purchasing and vendor invoice processing.

No matter which approach a company takes to automate its sales order process, automation holds the key to solving the dual dilemma of cost reduction and customer service improvement.

Jean-Michel Bérard is Worldwide CEO, President of the Board of Directors, Esker, Inc.  For further information visit www.esker.com.