Bringing powerful connections to your supply chain pays—and it’s not as complicated as you might think. Reach out to an Elemica consultant and see how you can start transforming your supply chain today.
The order-to-cash cycle might be a necessary evil. But if your organization is currently doing this sort of thing manually, it’s also an opportunity to give your financial KPIs a boost that lasts. From getting more cash, more quickly onto your balance sheet to minimizing overhead and maximizing lifetime profit-per-customer—here are four ways you can make the most of profits through digitization and automation.
When making the case to automate sales order processing, volume is an important consideration. Indeed, enterprises that spend hundreds, possibly even thousands of hours manually processing orders stand to benefit the most from automation. Not only does automation impact financial performance by saving a tremendous amount of time, it also significantly reduces costly errors. Because, high volume aside, keeping your team focused and your customers happy is something that can benefit the bottom lines of businesses at any size.
With lower volume and frequency, it can be tricky to justify taking the time to automate sales order processing—especially for some longtail customers. But supply chain connectivity solutions have come a long way, making it easier and more feasible to forge these connections with all of your trading partners, regardless of volume. By automating sales order processing, businesses of all sizes can streamline their order-to-cash cycle—simultaneously improving customer relationships and maximizing lifetime profit-per-customer.
The way we allow our customers to connect with our inventories can also have a powerful impact in our order-to-cash cycle. Granting real-time vendor-managed inventory capabilities can empower your customers to factor their current needs and future demands into their purchases. This not only optimizes inventory investment, but it also grants your customers invaluable peace of mind—preventing disruptions by facilitating transparency.
By improving your customer inventory support, you’re essentially establishing your business as a strategic partner for any client. You’re now turning key supply chain data into helpful insights that distinguish your enterprise as a dependable, value-added supplier. This goes beyond customer service, too. By mastering customer inventory support, you’re promoting stable economics for your business as well—creating lasting cooperation between you and your trading partners while streamlining order-to-cash.
Another way to boost the order-to-cash flow is to streamline the invoicing function of your business. It’s been said that some companies spend up to $10 processing a single invoice. By using automation to create a direct ERP connection, you can greatly reduce admin overhead, fractionalizing the time it takes while promoting a healthy order-to-cash cycle.
Automating your invoice function is also a great way to ensure accuracy and guarantee compliance every time. With the vast array of regulations, standard practices and procedures from country to country, locking in compliance and order insurance can be costly and time-consuming. Plus, streamlining these aspects of your invoicing function can promote a better order-to-cash flow and invoice accuracy so you don’t get hung up on the minor details while fulfilling these orders.
Even if your invoices and purchase orders are already automated, delivery scheduling is an entirely different ball of wax. Hold-ups in this final stretch of the process can put a considerable amount of stress on the order-to-cash process—so the management of scheduling agreement data can sometimes make or break a customer relationship.
For businesses familiar with these cumbersome spreadsheets, the headache is all too real. Small oversights and minute errors in manual entry can cause massive problems. But by establishing direct ERP-to-ERP connections, you can eliminate manual spreadsheet population and ensure that all scheduling agreement expectations are met every time. These automations present strong opportunities in customer service, greatly reducing delivery schedule mishaps, bypassing the headache and freeing up resources for more strategic needs.
Could your business benefit from any of these optimizations? If so, a great next step would be getting started with a digital connectivity initiative. There are numerous routes to take in order to automate your order-to-cash cycle, and every business has their own unique needs. Streamlining these processes through planned and well-executed automation can yield powerful results—boosting financial performance and freeing up valuable resources.
Have you already started down the pathway toward digital transformation? or you're like the millions of businesses who have yet to take the first steps toward digitizing their supply chain? Either way, speaking with a dedicated team of professionals can take away the guesswork and guide you as you make the decisions that help improve your company’s financial performance.
