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In today’s technology driven society, the pace of business is faster than ever. With access to new tools and innovations, manufacturers and distributors are expected to improve efficiency and customer service, delivering more with less and in increasingly rapid ordering cycles. All the while, customer service representatives are spending too much time manually entering emailed orders, instead of using time to grow the business by improving customer relationships.
Faced with this ever-growing demand, it has become vital that distributors and manufacturers optimize their operations, enhancing the efficiency of business processes to remain competitive. To remain competitive, companies know they must provide exemplary customer service and order processing and fulfillment. It can often be difficult to narrow down and identify areas in need of improvement that will generate the necessary high ROI. The important thing to remember is that future success in the distribution industry firmly hinges on the ability to embrace the unique requirements of each customer while processing orders quickly and accurately. This makes identifying areas for improvement a lot easier as the key to achieving this balance is to eliminate error-prone manual order entry, automating the process to accelerate order-to-cash cycles.
Most distributors already have dependable Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in place to help them automate repetitive administrative tasks, such as inventory control, accounting and shipment. Yet, many still process their customer orders by hand. This procedure entails a huge amount of manual entry from their customer service teams, compiling orders as they arrive and manually processing each one individually before re-entering it into the ERP system as a sales order. In addition to being a slow, labor-intensive task, it is a highly inefficient...