Process Automation in Order Processing

Robotics Process Automation is a buzz word in the technology landscape. Streamlining processes through systems will not suffice in terms of attaining operational efficiency. It is now highly important to shift employees to higher & efficient value work, eliminate back logs & improve responsiveness towards customers, for which enterprises: governmental & privately owned, must leverage automation.

Customers are the lifeblood for any business & with immense global competition, serving customers without delays & with order fulfilment becomes inevitable than ever before. Enterprise are investigating ways to provide highest quality services to their customers for maximizing business revenues & ensuring customer loyalty in return.

Organizations rely on customer services department typically to feed orders, received majorly via fax, phone & emails into localised deployed ERP system. This leaves a business, open to errors resulting via incorrect processing of orders further in inaccurate order fulfilment, customer returns & dissatisfaction. It becomes stressful for customer services team during peak seasons to keep up to the expectations of processing heap of orders, servicing customers, addressing complaints etc.

Automation in order processing, thus becomes a vital activity to streamline cross functional communication i.e. field sales team, sales administration, customer services, warehouse & logistics team, satisfy customers along with achieving operational excellence. This could be simply achieved through deployment of ordering bots, when business order requirements are diligently mapped for it to be understood by bots & built in algorithms to intelligently handle exceptions & notify apt team across business through timely notifications. Broadly ordering bots could achieve automation & lift work force to a higher value tasks:

  • Extract sales order data from all order types using RPA & cognitive capture, eliminating human entered data prone errors:
    • Fax
    • Email
    • Excel
    • CSV
    • XML
    • EDI

 

  • Build & apply validation checks enabled with a provision to feed/override certain data manually (only if required) to ensure pushing accurate sale order entry to a localized tool
  • For marketing companies having outsourced inventory & customer services operations, could easily rely on a RPA process basis output from outsourced logistics partner’s system & appropriate data extraction algorithms to capture all stock movements to replicate, book stocks & accounting to their local system with 100% accuracy & automation, reducing human intervention by 80 %. Automation is seamless as long as there are no changes to the output format from your logistics partner or unless a new transaction is invoked in the business process & it is then required to tweak your automation engine limited to the new process

Process-Automation-in-Order-Processing

Process Automation advantages, when applied to Order Processing:

  • Reduced data entry & errors
    • Every instance of human intervention is a chance for potential expensive errors & additional keystrokes slows process actions
  • Improvised inventory predictions
    • As you are able to automate order keying process at a real time, helps analyse inventory needs & position accurately, reducing chances of stock pile up & even stock out situations
  • Visibility & transparency
    • Customer services deck are able to bring transparency on order status & are able to serve customers with satisfaction
  • Lowers Processing Costs
  • Speeds up revenue cycles
  • Increases opportunities of cross-sell
  • Enables to resource teams to higher & valued activities
  • Happy Team, Happy Customers, Healthy Business

It is imperative to embed automation, keeping in mind the objective to serve customers better, as customers keep us in the business.