Options For Improving Your Sales Order Processing

There are many options for improving your sales order process. Each have their own advantages and disadvantages that will depend on the nature of your business, people, process and existing technology.

Here’s a brief overview of the different approaches to transforming and automating your sales order process.

Upgrading your existing ERP or business management system

It is a natural starting point to consider updating or even replacing a core ERP or CRM to address certain requirements for sales order efficiencies, process improvement or new services. It is also not for the faint hearted and shouldn’t be taken lightly. This approach can be long winded, costly, risky and in the end may not be best approach for handling specific challenges with your sales order process. By the time the change is made, the world and requirement might be completely different.

Whilst these systems are essential and great for core data and processes, they aren’t flexible. Updating  ERPs and CRMs to automate specific tasks, manage processes, connect systems or handle unstructured data can be a mistake. It is important you are clear on what data and processes you want core systems to manage and not try and make them everything to everyone.

This is the driving forces behind the huge growth of digital workflow and automation solutions on the market that work alongside and integrate with core business systems to bridge gaps and meet requirements faster and with less risk and cost.

66%, experienced some form of disruption in their operations during the implementation of their ERP systems. The Average ERP implementation is 16.9 months

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Our Approach to Sales Order Processing transformation

ProcessFlows specialise bespoke & custom Sales Order Processing solutions and services. Whilst we don’t offer ERPs or CRMs, but we make them and your operational processes work by integrating with them and doing the bits they don’t do well. Here some of the ways we can help transform your Sales Order Processing:

  • 1

    Custom Sales Order Process Management & Automation

    If updating your ERP, CRM or other core system is looking like a false promise and your existing systems are failing to meet your specific requirements for digital process management and automation – we can help.

    We specialise in custom & bespoke business process and task management to digitally manage and automate processes such as sales order processing, QTC and wider operational processes. We don’t sell ERPs but we make then work by delivering the elements that they can’t do well. We then integrate processes with ERPs and other core business systems to maintain their integrity as well as deliver the transformation benefits required at speed and at a lower cost

    Our capabilities for business process management, process automation and data capture can be tailored to digitise, automate and manage sales order processing tasks and workflows. Examples include:

    • Order booking, data entry, data capture, extraction, classification. Governed interaction between humans and machine
    • Order verifications, matching, look-ups and checks of other systems and business logic
    • Part codes, pricing , calculations, configurations, scheduling
    • Error or exceptional handling, alerts, status, checklist, routing, change management
    • Internal or external route approval processes
    • Multi-channels communications, status updates
    • Custom process management & task Automation We can also combine automation with exception handling through our service desks.
    • Content management, document templates, generation, clause libraries and
    • Disparate Systems updating via workflows, order documents or data distribution, archiving
    • Our solutions work alongside and integrate with your core systems to maintain integrity and simplicity whilst addressing the gaps and complexity they can’t handle. We have years of experience integrating with the following systems:  SAP, Microsoft Dynamics, Oracle, Sage, Finest, Dream.
    • Solutions can be on-premise, hybrid or cloud-based.
    • For more complex processes or requirements, our workflow platform and software development team can deliver fully customised and automated workflows based on industry standards best practice for Business Process Model & Notations (BPMN 2.0).
  • 2

    Sales Order Content Management

    All Quote to cash and sales order processes include a range of documents from proposals, Quotes, SoWs and Contracts to order confirmations. Managing versions, changes, clause libraries, collaboration is easier via a content management system. These systems can be directly linked to an ERP or everyday productivity tools such as Microsoft 365. A single of Point of view and search of all repositories is possible via federated search on some systems. More advanced Content Management platforms can automate and manage digitise sales order processes as well as integrate directly with ERPs. Their strength, particularly when working with ERPs is managing content throughout lifecycle from creation, search, collaboration and custom workflows to destruction, archive or publishing

  • 3

    Sales Order Process or Tasks delivered as a service

    Sometimes automation isn’t the only answer. Through our managed service delivery centre, we can provide outsourced sales order processing tasks as a service as well as provide sales order process itself as a service according to SLAs. Outsourced sales order processing could be as simple as dealing with the exceptions in an automated process or supporting with peak teams for your team. These services can complement and support automation or digital process management initiatives.

    • We can manage and deliver a wide range of sales order or wider operational tasks as a service in a compliant manner based on SLAs and standard operating procedures agreed with yourselves ie. process or automation exception handling, tracking, reports, checks, monitoring, manual processing or tasks
    • Single point of escalation and management of internal or external orders, queries, escalations, change requests, incidents etc
    • Helpdesks support or pro-active Service Desks – Out of hours, Multi-lingual support
    • Scale to extend hours or reach of operations to cover gaps
    • Our delivery centre can use your own systems, or our systems for service desks and automation – depending on what meets your requirements

    Find out more about our outsourced services here

  • 4

    Custom Sales Order Processing Dashboards, Business Intelligence & Data Analytics

    Getting a single point of view of your sales order status and performances vs KPIs can be a real issue when operations are in manual and data is stored in different systems and formats.

    We provide custom real-time dashboards and Business Intelligence capabilities to bring your sales order process data to life and give you the control and real-time visibility you need. These custom dashboards and reports can be specifically for sales order processing or part of wider business and operational visibility and control that includes the sales order process and what metric or KPI is required.

    For larger data sets and sources we can use Microsoft Advanced Data Analytics to interpret trends from different data types and sources for forecasting and modelling purposes.

  • 5

    Automated Sales Order Data Capture as a Service

    Where any order information isn’t digitised or isn’t structured ready for processing, we can provide automatic data capture, extraction and classification of the order ready for further processing ie an image of an order, a complete form or data in another system. Structured data is relatively simple to capture or integrate into core systems. Advances in capture  technology and our integrated service desks we can offer the highest level of accurate capture rates even semi structured or unstructured data. This support automated or digital sales order processing

  • 6

    Sales Order Process discovery assessment as a starting point for optimisation

    Transformation of sales order processes is not just about software, it is also about your business requirements and specific sales order situation and challenges across people, process and technology.

    We use a formal process and structured methodology for discovering, assessing, consulting, planning and delivering transformation – It’s the safest approach and delivers the best results for each business.

    Key elements and stages include

    • Understand specific business & operational requirements and sales order challenges
    • Understand the operational context – Map existing sales order processes including interconnected processes, people and systems – upstream and downstream.
    • Confirm assessment results, highlight gaps and propose any specific recommendations across people, process and systems
    • Once a specific sales order processing solution and or service is agreed, our accredited project management team manages the smooth implementation process through to signoff and transition to continuous improvement.

    Change can be daunting, contact us for a No Obligation consultation to help you identify the right approach to sales order processing for your business

Need Any Help?

We offer no-obligation assessments, consultations to help you identify the right approach to your sales order process challenges. To find out more or to book a consultation, please call +44 (0)1962 835053, email enquiries@processflows.co.uk, or fill in the form below.

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