4 Automated Order Processing Benefits for Manufacturers and Distributors

By: Pierce Smith, Senior Content Marketing Manager at Conexiom

Picture this: a surge in customer demand, an influx of orders flooding your inbox, and a dedicated team overwhelmed by the sheer volume of manual tasks required to process them. This type of logistical challenge has plagued customer service and sales teams for years. Manual order processing consumes precious time and resources, introduces errors, and causes costly delays. However, there’s a solution that alleviates the burden of manual processing and enhances accuracy and speed: automated order processing. Adopting automated order processing can drive growth for your business and dramatically enhance customer satisfaction.

TL;DR:

• Automated order processing improves customer satisfaction by reducing delays and errors associated with manual processing.
• It minimizes manual entry and order errors, making sure data is extracted with 100% accuracy.
• Automated order processing frees up employees to focus on more productive tasks, enhancing overall productivity.
• By streamlining workflows and automating routine tasks, it reduces costs and allows businesses to refocus on revenue-generating activities.
• Examples of order processing automation include syncing ERP and CRM systems, automating sales order routing, and extracting data from emailed invoices.
• Implementing automated order processing with a platform like Conexiom is crucial for business success in the fast-paced industrial B2B environment.

Automated Order Processing

Automated order processing isn’t a new concept, but through advances in machine learning, APIs, and other automation technologies, it’s better than ever before. These critical advances include such developments as:

• Predictive Analytics: AI and ML enable businesses to analyze historical data, customer behavior, and market trends. These algorithms can predict future demand accurately, allowing companies to optimize inventory levels to reduce overstock and plan for seasonal fluctuations.
• API Integration and Connectivity: API integration lets businesses easily connect their EDI systems, RPA solutions, inventory management systems, payment gateways, and shipping providers, streamlining the entire order-to-delivery process.
• Multi-Channel Order Integration: APIs integrate multiple sales channels, including e-commerce platforms, mobile apps, social media marketplaces, and brick-and-mortar stores, into a unified order processing system that seamlessly collects and manages orders across the entire sales landscape.

Today’s automated order processing has evolved into a sophisticated and highly efficient system, capable of seamlessly integrating with various ordering platforms, inventory management systems, customer relationship management tools, and EDI systems. Automated order processing can fulfill a crucial part of your business’s ERP needs. The ability to handle various tasks, from order capture and payment processing to inventory updates and shipping notifications, minimizes human error and ensures lightning-fast order fulfillment no matter your industry or ordering needs.

In the current hyper-competitive business landscape, B2B distributors and manufacturers must wholeheartedly embrace automation to remain competitive and, ideally, provide a customer experience that surpasses expectations. The advantages are apparent: organizations that have effectively integrated automation report cost reductions of approximately 10-15% and a substantial decrease in order processing times, often transitioning from days to mere hours.

What is Automated Order Processing?

Automated order processing uses technology like algorithms and software systems to streamline and manage a business’s entire lifecycle of customer orders. This process encompasses various tasks, such as order capture, payment processing, inventory management, order tracking, and communication with customers and suppliers, all performed with minimal human intervention. By automating these tasks, businesses can enhance efficiency, reduce errors, accelerate order fulfillment, and ultimately provide a more seamless and efficient experience for both customers and internal operations.

Automated order processing leverages advanced technologies like artificial intelligence and machine learning to handle order-related tasks and intelligently make data-driven decisions in real-time. It empowers organizations to optimize their operational efficiency and gain valuable insights from the data generated during the order fulfillment process, enabling continuous improvement and strategic decision-making. Each step of automated order processing minimizes potential human errors. It can replace rote, time-consuming tasks like manual data entry and validation, speeding up the order process and letting your employees focus on tasks that require their expertise and creativity, ultimately fostering a more productive and satisfied workforce. Conexiom is the best solution for order fulfillment, with an end-to-end platform that fully transforms manual processes into automated transactions.

Benefits of Automated Order Processing

Relying on manual methods introduces a high risk of errors and leads to sluggish order fulfillment processes, which can frustrate customers and hinder growth. Embracing automation in order processing streamlines operations, minimizes the likelihood of costly mistakes, enhances order accuracy, and significantly accelerates the entire order-to-delivery cycle. Moreover, it allows businesses to adapt swiftly to shifting market demands and improve customer satisfaction through faster service. Overcoming the limitations of manual order processing is a cornerstone of achieving operational excellence and staying competitive in the digital age.

1. Improve Customer Satisfaction

Improved customer satisfaction is vital to your organization’s bottom line. By minimizing the delays and errors often associated with manual order processing, businesses can provide customers with a seamless and efficient experience. Orders are processed and fulfilled faster, leading to quicker delivery times and reduced chances of order discrepancies. Automation allows for real-time order tracking and instant access to order history, empowering customer service teams to provide timely updates and resolve issues promptly. This heightened level of service builds trust and fosters loyalty, making sure that customers remain satisfied and engaged, ultimately benefiting the bottom line through repeat business and positive referrals.

For example, Conexiom’s order process automation platform allowed a global chemical industry enterprise with over $2.5 billion in annual revenue to stop manually processing its 400,000 annual purchase orders. This freed their customer service representatives, allowing them to perform more revenue-driving activities and customer assistance interactions, ultimately creating a vastly improved customer experience. Explore how Conexiom helped a 2.5 billion dollar chemical company save 800% on labor costs.

2. Minimize Manual Entry and Order Errors

Automated order processing is the only way to guarantee data extraction with 100% accuracy. Manual data entry errors are a constant problem with traditional order processing systems. By leveraging advanced algorithms and integrated software, automation significantly decreases the need for human intervention in data input and validation. This minimizes the possibility of keystroke errors, misinterpretations, or omissions. 

Order process automation enhances order accuracy and saves valuable time that would otherwise be spent on tedious data entry tasks. This allows businesses to allocate their human resources to more strategic and value-added activities. When the workforce is engaged in tasks that demand critical thinking and problem-solving rather than repetitive data entry, your organization creates a more efficient and error-free order-processing ecosystem.

Sales order entry automation empowered AccuformNMC to process orders faster with 100% accurate data extraction, saving money by reducing the expenses associated with order processing costs. This led to the nimble handling of high-order volumes without requiring extra staff.

3. Free Up Employees to be More Productive

Automated order processing catalyzes enhanced productivity. It dramatically accelerates order processing speeds and frees employees from the low-order manual and time-consuming tasks. Organizations can strategically reallocate their workforce with this newfound efficiency to improve the customer experience. By redirecting staff towards customer engagement, personalized support, and strategic decision-making, businesses can foster stronger customer relationships, proactively address inquiries and concerns, and ultimately create a more agile and customer-centric operation that drives productivity and satisfaction. Standard Electric used automated order processing to change its workforce allocation and accelerate processing speeds by 88%. 

4. Reduce Costs and Refocus on Revenue

By streamlining order processing workflows and automating routine tasks, organizations can process higher order volumes without the need for additional staff. This effectively contains labor costs and can save your company thousands of dollars– or more. Conexiom partnered with a Fortune 100 multinational conglomerate, helping them achieve remarkable savings of $3.8 million in manual entry costs alone. This success is not unique; businesses of all sizes will see that automated order processing frees up financial resources and enables them to refocus their efforts on driving revenue, innovation, and strategic growth initiatives. Find out how automation saved millions of dollars and brought processing speed down from hours to minutes in the Fortune 100 case study! 

Examples of Order Processing Automation

Order processing automation has numerous components and steps. Only Conexiom offers full automation anywhere you require manual data entry; here are just a few examples of what order processing automation looks like when you partner with us.

• Sync Your ERP and CRM

Automated order processing ensures accurate data is synced across your ERP and CRM or OMS for most digital orders. This integration empowers businesses with a holistic view of their operations, as CRM systems track customer interactions and preferences, while ERP systems manage core business processes like inventory and finance. When synchronized, these systems ensure that all customer data, orders, and interactions are accurately shared across departments, reducing data silos and enabling a 360-degree understanding of the customer journey. This improves order accuracy and enhances customer service by providing representatives with a holistic view of customer history and needs.

• Automate Sales Order Routing

By analyzing factors like inventory levels, shipping costs, and delivery times, automation ensures that each order gets optimally routed for efficient fulfillment. This accelerates order processing, reduces shipping costs, and enhances the customer experience by expediting delivery. It also aids in inventory management by preventing overstock or stockouts and improving order accuracy and customer satisfaction. Automation streamlines sales logistics, delivering benefits for both businesses and their customers through swifter, cost-effective, and more reliable order processing.

• Extract Data from Emailed Invoices

Automated order processing incorporates advanced capabilities, including extracting data from emailed invoices. This integration streamlines order fulfillment and effortlessly processes information embedded within emailed invoices. Instead of wasting valuable employee hours rekeying emailed orders, automation leverages intelligent data extraction algorithms to swiftly and accurately pull data from emails. This includes such data as invoice numbers, item details, quantities, and pricing. Automation accelerates the entire order-to-payment cycle while reducing the risk of errors. This synergy of order processing and data extraction from emailed invoices represents a powerful evolution in operational efficiency and data management, benefiting businesses across diverse industries.

Discover how much you can save with Conexiom by exploring our ROI calculator.

Implement Automated Order Processing with Conexiom

Implementing automated order processing is crucial for the success of your business. Industrial B2B’s fast pace means that your order processing needs to be faster and more accurate than human effort can typically match. Even the best-trained employees can still make typos and errors, but with Conexiom’s automation, your order processing can proceed quickly– in under two minutes. Wherever you require manual data entry, Conexiom’s platform can enhance your workforce, improve your customer experience, and support your financial bottom line. 

Don’t get left behind– request a demo of Conexiom today!

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