Sales order automation revolutionizes your business by streamlining every aspect of the sales process, freeing your sales team to focus on what truly matters–generating profit and driving growth. By embracing this transformative technology, you can rid your company of mundane tasks and embrace a future where your team’s expertise shines brighter than ever.
As automation technology continues to evolve, the benefits are changing, too. In this article, we explore the lesser-known advantages of sales order automation and explain why it can enormously impact your business.
Let’s kick off with a definition.
Sales order automation is an advanced software feature that seamlessly orchestrates the creation and fulfillment of sales orders. It encompasses every stage, from capturing and validating orders to approvals, processing, tracking, updates, forecasting, and insightful reporting.
The sales order automation workflow consists of three key stages, as described below.
Sales order automation software uses Intelligent Data Capture (IDC) technology to capture and extract structured data, such as a customer’s order history, and unstructured data, such as written communications. It indexes the order and moves on to the next step.
The software confirms customer information, POs, quotes, credit checks, part numbers, and more, identifying any missing or incorrect information. If there’s a problem, the software routes the order to the correct individual for them to tweak, cancel, or approve.
If conditions are met, the order is then accepted, reviewed, initiated, and sent straight for fulfillment.
Automated sales order entry boasts numerous benefits, including time savings on repetitive tasks, cost reduction, improved accuracy, and enhanced productivity. Crucially, it enables teams to focus on high-value, revenue-generating activities.
Before moving on to this sales order automation’s more unexpected benefits, let’s quickly cover the familiar advantages.
Sales order automation can:
As sales order automation grows in popularity, eliminating manual errors, reducing costs, driving automation, and improving transaction efficiency, some hidden benefits rise to the surface. So, let’s go through them in some more detail.
Creating a single source of truth is essential for driving efficiency and productivity in any organization. One way to achieve this is through sales order automation, which reduces human errors like typos or data entry mistakes and eliminates inconsistencies that can hinder business operations.
These inconsistencies arise when team members use different formats and systems to enter and evaluate information, leading to confusion and poor processing. By implementing sales order automation, businesses can establish a unified system that ensures seamless information flow and promotes optimal performance.
Your sales staff is one of the most important resources within your organization. They can, in fact, be the difference between success and failure. Unfortunately, the best reps can also be hard to retain.
By incorporating sales order processing automation, you can turn those repetitive and tedious tasks into manageable and meaningful processes. You can reduce workload and stress, create a greater sense of purpose and job satisfaction, and benefit from happier and more engaged employees who stay longer and do better work.
The top sales order automation systems use advanced technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to process orders quickly and accurately, eliminating human intervention.
AI technology employs algorithms and models to process data and information. ML seeks out patterns and learns new things on its own without requiring explicit programming. Providing more data to a computer improves its ability to detect errors and enhances workflow efficiency.
By 2025, Millennials are projected to constitute 75% of the global workforce, a striking figure that emphasizes the need to adapt to the preferences of this emerging generation of professionals.
Digital natives aren’t fans of old-school, high-touch sales approaches. They prefer smooth, automated sales and delivery experiences. By incorporating automation into your sales operations, you can appeal to these savvy customers and take advantage of their quick decision-making and purchasing habits.
Your company’s success depends on a steady stream of accurate data to boost efficiency and automation. But when low-quality data is full of mistakes, it can create inaccuracies and inconsistencies that mess up crucial systems like your ERP (“garbage in, garbage out.”)
Sales order automation software harnesses the power of intelligent data capture to transform chaotic, unstructured data into organized, structured information primed for secure storage and analysis. Furthermore, this innovative solution identifies and rectifies errors automatically, guaranteeing seamless operations for your company and its interconnected systems.
Several other technologies can be enabled or integrated with sales order automation systems, further optimizing the process and helping digitize your business. Technologies include:
Optical Character Recognition (OCR): OCR lets you extract text from scanned documents and images and convert them automatically into digital data.
Electronic Data Interchange (EDI): EDI technology enables companies to exchange documents seamlessly, quickly, securely, and automatically.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM): Integrating sales order automation with CRM lets you manage customer relationships better. You can track sales activities and streamline communication with timely updates.
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP): Integration with ERP lets sales orders trigger updates to inventory, production, and financial systems, keeping your business in sync.
E-Commerce: Sales order automation is vital to selling online, ensuring orders can be processed quickly and accurately with a single click.
Business Intelligence (BI): Sales order information can be routed to tools that provide data-driven insights and analytics for fast, effective strategic decision-making.
Business is more competitive than ever, so if you want to keep up, you need the best tools for the job. A sales order automation system will help you streamline all the manual, time-consuming tasks associated with the sales process, enabling your teams to work more efficiently and continue unlocking new capabilities to boost your business.
Sales order automation does a lot more than save time and money. When working with the right sales order automation vendor, you can dramatically improve the quality of your data, cater to the modern buyer, improve employee morale, and adopt new digital technologies to stay ahead of the competition.
Adding value to your business, productivity to your process, and profit to your bottom line DocStar ECM Sales Order Automation takes the extra work and worry out of sales order entry, automating the process and eliminating manual sales-order entry errors. Download the fact sheet then request a personal demo.
