In the competitive e-commerce world, timely order delivery could be a tipping point between a customer returning for the next purchase and one that will shop elsewhere. To ensure high customer satisfaction and increase sales, B2B and B2C companies must deliver frictionless experiences, with effective order management being the backbone.
Order management is the first step of the Order-to-Cash process and drives revenue and customer experience for businesses in the manufacturing, e-commerce, hardware, and chemical industries. However, without comprehensive visibility into end-to-end processes, factors like inefficient manual processes, cross-functional silos, and inaccurate data will create problems that will slow down deliveries. To overcome these challenges with process insights, business leaders like you turn to automated processes discovery tools like SurfaceAI.
Here are three ways process discovery can accelerate processes and increase accuracy of order management:
- View order management as a strategic initiative: Order Management drives customer experience. Yet, most business managers see it as a cost center and focus on supply chain issues such as optimizing working capital. When business leaders put order management on the back burner, it takes a hit on customer satisfaction, retention, and eventually revenue.
Process discovery helps to uncover efficiency gaps in workflows. As order management sits in the middle of finance, supply chain, sales, and customer service functions, the processes are complex and hidden from the naked eye. With a holistic, data-driven approach, business leaders get deeper insights into process dependencies to solve frictions like low on-time delivery, high process costs, or low customer satisfaction. - Prioritize accuracy over speed: There’s no doubt that the pandemic has catalyzed the business space. While supply chains all over the world took a hit, businesses had to think of new ways to speed up processes and meet customer expectations. However, speed is not always the right solution to all problems. Let’s say there is a human error at an early stage of order processing, and it goes unnoticed downstream, which eventually causes the order to be held. Dealing with thousands of delayed or withheld orders can become unmanageable for a customer service manager or order management supervisor. Reviewing each process manually and identifying the next logical step could take an incredible amount of time.
Automated process discovery, on the other hand, can help audit processes and conduct root cause analysis. A software like SurfaceAI can scan through end-to-end processes spread across multiple people and technology. This helps businesses to put accuracy before speed and achieve better efficiency. - Identify the right automation opportunities: Today, most of the order management processes are manual. Order processing teams are often bogged down by a lack of streamlined information from finance, inventory, and sales teams. In addition, they are slowed by order rejections, unnecessary credit checks, and order holds.
While automating technologies like RPA can automate repetitive tasks, many leaders have realized that automation is not as easy as it seems. In addition, automating a wrong process can have a downstream effect that can become costlier than manual completion of tasks.
With automated process discovery, businesses can automate the right processes within the order management function. For instance, they can automate selective credit checks to eliminate selling to customers who have lousy repayment records instead of automating the entire process for every customer, which can delay on-time delivery.
Want to learn how SurfaceAI can power up your order management process? Sign-up for a free demo.