Follow Your Orders!

We’re all expected to do more with less. The challenge is how. Next time you are looking for inspiration – try following an order through your business from receipt to despatch/service delivery/cash collection. 

Start at the beginning – look at the documentation/information that you ask your customers to submit – then pick up the next order your business receives – and start recording each step in its journey. 

1. Is the order “proceedable” – is all the documentation complete? 

1. Where is the original documentation kept? 

1. How many people “touch” the order in some way? 

1. How many different systems do people update with order details? 

1. How long do each of these steps individually take?  

1. What’s the elapsed time from order receipt to the transaction being complete? 

1. What was the customers experience? 

Having engaged with 100’s of businesses – our suspicions would be these… 

1. That a % of all orders are not proceedable – customers and salespeople find ways to not provide the minimum required information and documentation. Your systems my not help them get it right. This causes confusion, frustration, and delay. 

1. That your order documentation (to include the correspondence that took place pre order) is all over the place – on people's laptops, on email, everywhere but a central, secure place 

1. That over time order processing gets made more complex. Staff, acting on their own initiative and in good faith, will introduce new steps in the process to facilitate some new requirement (often reporting). You may find some people involved that don’t actually advance the fulfilment process. 

1. That – on the same basis – you’ll find that the order (in whole or part) is entered into more than one business system – a CRM system, a Sales Order Processing System – a service scheduling system. Even more likely you will find multiple spreadsheets updated along the way – to help people calculate commission or track receipt thru to completion of their part of the fulfilment process. 

1. That, if you add up the amount of time people take handling the paperwork and apply some reasonable cost per hour – the total cost of order processing might surprise you. We’ve seen research that shows some businesses that process a high volume of low value orders doing it for less than £0.10. We’ve seen other organisation processing a low volume of high value orders doing it for around £100. The challenge is for those organisations in between – aligning volume/value and cost of their transactions.  

1. That the elapsed time it takes from order receipt to transaction complete will disappoint you – finding ways to do it quicker will improve customer service, reduce the cost per transaction and advance cash. 

1. That feedback from your customers with regard to your order processing - whether that relate to your order documentation, visibility of order progress, inconsistent tone – will always be illuminating 

How Can TSG Help? 

If you find opportunities to improve – ways in which you could spend less time and money doing a better job for your customers – please give us a call. We’ve got a team of great people who can work with you to explore how your business systems could do a better of supporting your business and ambition.