Today’s Customer Management Challenge

OmPrompt Quick Read

Optimise Your Order-to-Cash Process

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DID YOU KNOW?

The #1 practice leading to effectiveness and

quality in the revenue cycle is “using tools for

automatic assessment and cleansing of customer and

product master data.”IBM 2013

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Of the millions of transactions that are part of the supplier-customer order-to-cash (O2C) process, some transactions, like sales calls, are opportunities for suppliers to build their relationship with a customer. Most, however, represent no such opportunity to add value – but do have the potential to erode the relationship if they go wrong.

Every time an order, order acknowledgement, shipment notice, proof-of-delivery note, or invoice is delayed or inaccurate, you run the very real risk of disappointing your customer.

For these millions of daily transactions to operate efficiently, consistently accurate and on-time communication must take place between all the different systems involved in transactions. A practical solution would be to standardise communications across all customers and all systems. But suppliers just don’t have the leverage to impose standards; instead, you’re forced to try to accommodate a dizzying array of formats, processes, and data types.

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The Cost of Manual InterventionAdapting to these diverse formats requires time-consuming manual intervention and workarounds, with people in customer service, accounts, and logistics often called on to process orders and goods receipt notes (GRNs), chase proof of delivery documents (PODs), and check the validity of claims.

However, time and effort that these customer-facing people spend on manual tasks is time they could be spending building relationships with customers.

Manual intervention also leads to costly mistakes and delays that cause customers to lose confidence in your ability to serve them.

Today, a perfect order performance of 45% to 55% is seen as good, with manual intervention filling all the gaps.

Key pressures to implement O2C process automation

Pressure to reduce overall costs 67%

Risk of customer non-payment or default 29%

Customer demand to improve service levels 29%

Inability to accurately forecast cash flow 21%

Rising cost of servicing major customers 19%

Customer pressure to extend payment terms 19%

TABLE: The desire to improve the O2C process is great. According to a 2011 Aberdeen Group study, 67% of those surveyed cited “pressure to reduce overall costs” as the primary reason for evaluating their current O2C processes. Other reasons included “risk of customer non-payment or default,” and “customer demand to improve service levels.”

The problem is driving up costs, slowing revenue growth, and

eroding customer loyalty. In an increasingly competitive world, this is no longer is no longer sustainable.

What suppliers need is a tool that communicates all this transaction-related information using the

customer’s preferred and/or optimal mode, and for the translation mechanism to be automated and error-free.

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OmPrompt Customer Automation Management is a cloud-based managed service that captures, centralises, automates, and shares all the critical intelligence from the documents we analyse as a company-wide resource via an easy-to-use dashboard, freeing up your staff to add the kind of value that allows your company to compete more effectively.

Our solution combines technology, people, and processes to provide the capabilities essential to handle the diversity of transaction formats and preferences, including adaptive multi-

format support, intelligent business rules processing, customer master data validation, and accelerated exception management.

OmPrompt automates non-standard but commonly-occurring events in the O2C process to boost efficiency and improve the level of service your team delivers.

It also recognises exceptions and accelerates their management, all whilst updating its business rules engine for future reference. OmPrompt automates every form of transactional message through every part of the O2C process, from ordering through to fulfilment, delivery, invoicing, payment, dispute management, customer care, and more.

The Solution? OmPrompt Customer Automation Management

Our solution combines technology, people, and processes to handle the diversity of your customers’ transaction formats and preferences!

Using customer-facing people to remedy inconsistencies and errors in the O2C process isn’t the answer. OmPrompt Customer Automation Management is.

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With OmPrompt, you’re able to automate customer management processes and eliminate:

• Inaccurate sales orders

• High fulfilment error rates

• High Days Sales Outstanding (DSO)

• The inability to meet special customer requests and sudden changes

• The high cost of resolving disputes around customer claims

• Long-term losses resulting from customer dissatisfaction

• The costs and errors associated with manual intervention.

With OmPrompt, You Can Do It!

Primary objectives cited for O2C automation

Reduce days sales outstanding (DSO) 54%

Improve cash flow forecasting 42%

Reduce receivables processing cost/time 36%

Reduce the length of the O2C process 35%

Improve transaction efficiency and cash collection 34%

Manage credit risk, losses from bad debt, and collection costs 30%

TABLE: A 2011 Aberdeen Study showed the #1 objective for organisations when automating part/all of their O2C processes was to reduce DSO.

Many of the world’s leading brands are using OmPrompt Customer Automation Management to:

These companies have reduced processing costs by up to 30%, accelerated cash collection by 20%, and improved service levels.

Automate up to 100% of their orders

Track and manage on-time performance and KPIs across all deliveries, instantly invoicing the clean ones

Automate the collection and reconciliation of proof-of-delivery (POD) documentation.

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“Can we achieve more, faster, and with the same or fewer resources – without compromising our ability to deliver a very high level of service?”Yes, it is possible to strike this critical balance and radically improve your O2C process performance by eliminating the workarounds performed by staff in order to bridge gaps in the process or between systems.

To better understand where the gaps are in your O2C process and if your organisation could benefit from customer automation management, you must first look at the current state of your processes. Within each step – order, fulfilment, and payment – we recommend you investigate the following:

• The causes of mistakes. Are workarounds leaving you vulnerable to error? When errors are made, what are the consequences and what do they cost you?

• Where does variation or constraint in speed and processing time impact your overall efficiency? What slows you down? Does it impact other departments? What workarounds have you put in place?

• Are you able to identify, escape, and resolve exceptions in a timely fashion? If not, what impact does this have on the rest of your business?

• Where are you diverting people to work around gaps in technology or processes? How much cash could you release by automating these workarounds?

• Where are you missing opportunities to add value to the customer experience because people are being diverted from customer contact?

• Are there areas for which your managers are accountable but where they have less control than they would like?

Call our team of experts and see how OmPrompt can help your business!+44 (0)1235 436000 or visit: www.omprompt.com

Decide for Yourself: Can Your O2C Processes be Optimised?

How you answer these questions will provide a clear picture of where opportunities exist to optimise

your processes through intelligent automation.

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OmPrompt Ltd67 Innovation DriveMilton Park, AbingdonOxfordshire, OX14 4RQUnited Kingdom

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As the pioneer of customer automation management, OmPrompt helps a growing number of the world’s leading brands eliminate gaps in the order-to-cash process that have tradition ally required manual workarounds.

OmPrompt has innovative ways of automating repeti tive manual work in the customer management cycle, enabling clients to free up resources, manage by exception, remove restric tions, and eliminate risks to their businesses.

Our intelligent, cloud-based solutions are delivered as a service, co-exist with EDI-based solutions, are quick to deploy, easy to extend, and offer an exceptionally fast ROI.

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