Sales order automation benefits the supply chain

This is an excerpt of the original article. It was written for the September-October 2018 edition of Supply Chain Management Review. The full article is available to current subscribers.

September-October 2018

If it’s September, it must be time for Gartner’sTop 25 supply chains, the lead article in this issue of Supply Chain Management Review. As I was reading this year’s contribution from Gartner, I was struck by the number of the Top 25 that have launched NextGen Supply Chain initiatives, using Big Data, artificial intelligence (AI), robotic process automation (RPA), machine learning and the like to digitize their supply chains. It made me wonder: Is the rest of the pack falling behind or are they ready to follow the leaders?

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Efficient order fulfillment is a key factor in maintaining strong relationships with customers, whether or not they are strategic partners. Yet many organizations struggle with getting this right, as they rely heavily on manual processes with significant data entry.

Manually processing orders can lead to significant disruptions caused by order input errors, a lack of integration between the order database and other internal systems, and a lack of visibility into the end-to-end process of creating, filling and delivering orders.

Sales order automation offers the potential for eliminating many of these errors and interruptions. This in turn can provide quantifiable benefits to the organization. When adopting sales order automation, APQC recommends automation specifically for processing sales orders, not solely adopting an electronic data interchange (EDI) for sales orders or an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system for inventory control.

Both internally developed systems and those purchased from an external vendor offer benefits over organizations relying on manual processes. APQC recently conducted research on this topic in partnership with Esker, a document processing automation solution provider.

The goal of the research was to identify how different sales order automation practices affect performance on key measures. For the supply chain, automating sales order processing can lead to benefits with regard to order cycle time and perfect order performance.

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