The world of business is witnessing a shift toward a more streamlined, efficient approach that liberates sales teams from the shackles of redundant tasks. This innovation comes in the form of sales order automation, a boon to businesses that allows them to highlight their team’s competence while doing away with the trivial.
As we plunge deeper into the age of automation, the advantages keep multiplying. In this piece, we delve into the often-overlooked merits of automating sales orders and how it could dramatically boost your business performance.
To start off, let’s decode what sales order automation is.
Decoding Sales Order Automation
This advanced tool helps orchestrate the creation and fulfillment of sales orders in a seamless manner, involving every stage from order capture and validation to approvals, processing, tracking, forecasting, and finally, insightful reporting.
The journey of sales order automation can be broken down into three integral phases:
1Capture
At this stage, Intelligent Data Capture (IDC) technology is used by the software to collect and sift through structured and unstructured data like a customer’s order history and written communications. The order is indexed and the process moves to the next stage.
2Validate
The software performs a thorough validation of customer information, POs, quotes, credit checks, part numbers, and more, pointing out any inconsistencies or missing data. If any discrepancy arises, the order is routed to the right individual to review, cancel, or approve.
3Process
Upon satisfying all the required conditions, the order is accepted, reviewed, initiated, and dispatched for fulfillment.
Commonly Recognized Benefits of Sales Order Automation
Sales order automation has been praised for its manifold benefits which include saving time on monotonous tasks, cutting down costs, enhancing accuracy, and promoting productivity. At its core, it enables teams to channel their energy towards tasks that add value and generate revenue.
Before we navigate to the less-discussed benefits of sales order automation, let’s briefly go over the commonly recognized ones.
Sales order automation has the potential to:
- Accelerate your order processing: It expedites the entire cycle, trimming down the time needed to process orders and deliver services or products to your customers. Swift order processing can greatly enhance your company's reputation for exceptional service.
- Automate data checks: Automation in sales order processing allows you to cross-check data against different systems like your ERP, helping you identify inconsistencies and errors.
- Improve customer experience: By freeing up your sales and customer service team from mundane tasks, sales order automation significantly enhances the customer experience. This, in turn, empowers employees to actively listen, build relationships, and make decisions that catalyze long-term growth of the company.
Undiscovered Benefits of Sales Order Automation
As automation in sales order continues to gain traction, a multitude of latent benefits are coming to the forefront. Let’s unpack these advantages in more detail.
Eradicating Inconsistencies and Establishing a Single Source of Truth
Achieving a single source of truth is crucial for any organization aiming to improve efficiency and productivity. Sales order automation serves as an effective way to achieve this by minimizing human errors like typos or data entry mistakes and eliminating inconsistencies that might hamper business operations.
Boosting Employee Satisfaction and Retention
Your sales team serves as a vital cog in the success machine of your organization. Thus, retaining the best members is often challenging but highly crucial. Incorporating sales order automation can morph tedious tasks into meaningful processes, thereby reducing stress, enhancing job satisfaction, and fostering a conducive work environment. This leads to more engaged employees who perform better and are more likely to stay.
Ingraining Continuous Improvement (Allowing Your System to Learn on Its Own)
Cutting-edge sales order automation systems leverage advanced technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to expedite order processing while eliminating the need for human intervention.
Accommodating Millennial Buyers
By 2025, it’s projected that Millennials will form 75% of the global workforce. This underscores the need to align with the preferences of this emerging generation of professionals. By incorporating automation into your sales operations, you can attract these tech-savvy customers and capitalize on their rapid decision-making and purchasing tendencies.
Validating and Enhancing Data
A steady inflow of accurate data is paramount to boost efficiency and automation in your company. Sales order automation software harnesses intelligent data capture to convert messy, unstructured data into organized information, ready for secure storage and analysis. This solution not only identifies but also fixes errors automatically, ensuring smooth operations for your company and its interconnected systems.
Integrating Additional Technology
Sales order automation systems can also integrate or enable other technologies, further optimizing the process and facilitating your business’s digital transformation. These technologies include:
OCR allows you to extract text from scanned documents and images and convert them into digital data.
EDI technology enables companies to exchange documents in a seamless, secure, and automated manner.
Integrating sales order automation with CRM can help you better manage customer relationships, track sales activities, and streamline communication with timely updates.
Integration with ERP allows sales orders to trigger updates to inventory, production, and financial systems, keeping your business in harmony.
Sales order automation is essential for online sales, ensuring orders can be processed swiftly and accurately with a single click.
Information from sales orders can be routed to tools that provide data-driven insights and analytics for effective strategic decision-making.
In Conclusion: The Need for Sales Order Automation
The business landscape is more competitive than ever, and to thrive, you need the right tools at your disposal. A sales order automation system can streamline all the manual tasks associated with the sales process, enabling your team to work more effectively and unlock new potentials to elevate your business.
Sales order automation is more than a time and cost-saving tool. With the right vendor, you can significantly improve data quality, cater to modern buyers, elevate employee morale, and adopt new digital technologies to stay competitive.
Adding value to your business, enhancing productivity in your process, and contributing to your bottom line – Mosaic’s Sales Order Automation is here to take the excess work and worry out of sales order entry, eliminating manual errors. Download the fact sheet and request a personalized demo.
