If your customer order management procedures are causing order errors, late deliveries, customer dissatisfaction, and other problems, you and your employees may spend much time doing things over.
There are three common challenges that wholesalers, manufacturers, and distributors face today.
First, is how to manage and sense demand accurately. Second, is the ability to respond to changing customer order delivery expectations. Third, is the ability to accurately promise dates based on fulfillment planning lead times and estimates. These challenges are presenting companies with a startling reality, "how effectively they manage their order and fulfillment process directly effects their business's success and survival."
While many business owners and executives think that these issues are unique to their organizations, the fact is that businesses across the spectrum of wholesale, distribution, and manufacturing face the same supply chain challenges. Every business is now realizing that managing its fulfillment processes is becoming multifaceted and certainly more complicated. All this happens simultaneously when customer demands and expectations intensify and order processing windows narrow.
A key area for businesses is understanding your customers and managing that customer demand effectively. Accurately capturing your customer's orders is critical to effective order fulfillment and management. Many companies continue to work with complex, fragmented order management processes with multiple disparate order capture and fulfillment systems. Working in this type of environment makes it difficult to get a single view or complete picture of your customer.
You are not unique if you seem to be facing these same challenges with your current customer order management procedures. However, do not despair; there are solutions out there. Let us look at what an efficient, integrated customer order management system will do to improve your business's bottom line and protect your competitive advantage.
The advanced demand capabilities of customer order management significantly improve the ability to manage erratic product demand and realize higher forecast accuracy. Two capabilities that augment accurate forecasting are demand sensing and shaping. With a multi-order channel system, it is difficult to capture customer purchase data to forecast future product demand. When order capturing is integrated, data is visible, and businesses have the information readily available to develop a more accurate forecast for future demand.
To meet mounting customer expectations, businesses across all industries must increase their on-time deliveries, enhance the consistency and accuracy of their promises to customers, and manage their responsibilities to key customers. By merging dynamic, real-time, data-driven processes with manufacturing, supplier, and logistics constraints, businesses can quickly and reliably promise order fulfillment with processes that improve customer service levels and satisfaction.
For many businesses, order complexity is a key challenge when managing orders and their fulfillment. This difficulty in managing orders efficiently and accurately has been caused by a number of factors, including the use of multiple order capture and fulfillment legacy systems that many companies have in place. To eliminate these silos and give organizations a holistic view into the order operations, an order management solution cuts through the business' current order process complexity and creates a centralized view.
Success in order management and fulfillment hinges on the ability to make quick decisions and the continuous monitoring of the impact of those decisions at all levels of your business. This can be achieved with customer order management software, capable of instituting best-practice processes across all facets of your order management and fulfillment procedures.