Everyone loves to make a sale. But processing inbound purchase orders rapidly and accurately comes at a cost.
Traditionally, accounts payable (AP) has always been a hands-on job. If you’re a growing business, that’s a problem.
Your customer service representative (CSR) team is tasked with manually extracting the customer’s name, product description, unit of measure (UOM), the number of units, price, and delivery details from each order and inputting them into your sales order system.
While manual data entry is resource-heavy, costly and error-prone at the best of times, the drawbacks of doing things by hand don’t stop there.
For example, do the prices match? Does the price the customer has written match the UOM? For example, are they expecting 1 metre of cable as indicated by the price they’ve entered when they actually ordered 100 metres? Or is the price out-of-date or flat out wrong?
And then, the delivery details. Is the specified address the same as the one on file, or is it a new one, or one of many alternatives (for example, direct to one of several branches rather than a centralised warehouse or depot)? And how does this impact the freight calculation?
Every variable impacts the speed with which you can convert a purchase order into an accurate, ready-to-go sales order.
The outcomes of slow processing include potential bottlenecks, and a decline in customer loyalty.
Introducing Sales Order Automation
By automating the conversion of a customer’s purchase order into a sales order, you speed up the rate of doing business and improve outcomes while reducing overheads.
Our Sales Order Automation solution turns a tedious, manual task into a streamlined and efficient one. Without adding touchpoints.
In fact, unless there’s an issue with the purchase order, it doesn’t even go near a human. So, your CSR team can focus on resolving issues, finding alternatives to out-of-stock or obsolete product lines, taking a proactive approach to querying and addressing dubious UOMs or price expectations, and letting customers know that their happiness is your priority.
Not only does your team become more productive by focussing only on problems, but sales orders are far more accurate, as are freight calculations. So, while you increase your revenue and customer satisfaction, your cost-to-serve goes down.
Why Sales Order Automation is going to make your CSR and customers equally happy
Handle more purchase orders without growing your team
By removing manual processes, you can manage increased sales order volumes without adding more resources, or sacrificing timeliness!
100% sales order visibility
All orders and their status as they are processed and fulfilled are visible to the business. So, if a customer does call, providing an instant update is easy!
Real-time reporting
You’ll always know how many sales orders are in your system, and how many are being handled personally by your CSR team at any time, or if any are outstanding and need urgent attention.
Speed up the ordering and fulfilment process
If a customer’s purchase order is perfect, then it’s turned into a sales order in your ERP within moments, and can be processed by the warehouse, picked, packed, and despatched with blistering speed.
Never lose a purchase order again
Once your customer’s PO enters our Sales Order Automation solution, it’s a done deal, and its progress from order to despatch is transparent and trackable from go to whoa. You can also enable automated emails to provide real-time updates to your customers, reducing the volume of PO and fulfilment enquiries dramatically.
Support remote working
Our sales order solution is cloud-based, so your CSR team can work from anywhere in the world, sorting out any issues. All they need is an internet connection.
