Essent Webinars: Order Like a Champion

Time is money. How much does Order Entry cost you? Entering, re-entering, and tracking orders takes time. Fixing flawed orders takes even more. And if flawed order makes it all the way to the customer, now you have a big problem. This video shows you how to Write the Order Right to save time and money. Don't let Order Entry cost you. Make your company an Order Entry Champion.

Watch the Essent Business Anaylsis Webinar

Slide 1: Order Like a Champion

Hello and welcome to today’s webinar. Today we’re going to show you how to Order Like a Champion. All the imperfections of the order entry process add up into some big costs that you can avoid, as we will see soon. So we’ll show you how to create Well-Formed Orders, which are free of errors and save time and money for your company.

Slide 2: Moderator: Douglas B. Brill

My name is Doug Brill. I’m the Essent marketing coordinator and specializing in the promotional products industry. I’m also your moderator today.

Slide 3: About Essent

Before we begin, a very brief overview of Essent. Essent is the leader in providing Comprehensive business management solutions since 1981 Essent has been serving Distributors, Decorators, and Suppliers in the promotional products industry since the year 2000 $3 Billion in Commerce flows through Essent’s solutions each year

Slide 4: Who Can Be A Champion?

Order Entry Champions can be almost anyone in your company. from executives, to operations managers, to sales reps, to support staff. And even fulfillment and accounting professionals. Order Entry Champions understand and use the technology tools to save your company time and money by processing Well-Formed Orders. Order Entry Champions may never even touch an order. A company president who establishes the rules and adopts the technology to enforce the rules is an Order Entry Champion, too.

Slide 5: What’s a Well-Formed Order?

So what is a Well-Formed Order? When we talk about Well-Formed Orders, we mean orders that are right the first time and stay right through the entire order pipeline. The savings can be huge, as we will see in a moment, because you don’t have to spend time and money fixing them. They include all the required information. You don’t have to revisit or change them. And more often than not, a Well-Formed order is automated. The more manual processes involved in an order, the greater the chances something will go wrong.

Slide 6: Order Entry is Big Money

And why should I worry about Order Entry? Because it’s big money. One promotional products Vice President told PPB Magazine that incomplete and incorrect orders cost his promotional products company $13,000 per day. Over the course of a year, that adds up to $4 million. Every moment spent discussing, adjusting, and re-entering orders costs man-hours, the VP explained. And the more orders you have, the bigger the cost. Another promotional products company told PPB that two-thirds of its orders are flawed, which costs everyone time and money. Imagine that multiplied over hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of orders.

Slide 7: Presenter: William Austin

And with that, here to take you into greater detail is your presenter, Will Austin. Will is a business analyst for Essent. He’s also a specialist in the promotional products industry. He’ll show you some of the ways to Write the Order Right to save your business time and money.

Slide 8: Topic

In today’s webinar, we will be identifying and highlighting tools you need to process well-formed orders and become an order entry champion.

Slide 9: Sales Order Entry

We all know that sales orders can make us profit …like the bags of money that we see on the screen. And we also know the problems can arise during sales order entry, but have you considered how those problems are effecting your profit?

Slide 10: Order Entry Problems

…So what are the problems that effect profit? Order Entry is time consuming which effects profit. Profit is effected because Order Entry is Error Prone Dissatisfied customers also means less profit. And before you realize it, you have all these problems and no profit.

Slide 11: Order Entry is Time Consuming

The first problem is Order Entry is Time Consuming. Entering an order might take minutes but if you multiply those minutes by the number orders that you process. Those minutes become hours And those hours become days And days into weeks and so on. Let’s suppose the average order takes 5 minutes to process and you are entering 10 orders a day. That’s about an hour a day consumed by order entry. Now consider the number of minutes if we take that 50 minutes a day for a 5 day work week or 250 minutes and then multiple it by 52 weeks. That’s 13,000 minutes and that’s approximately 27 eight hour work days. That’s almost a month just devoted to sales order entry. The bottom-line is time is money And the more time it takes to process an order, you are increasing your opportunity cost and that takes you away from selling And time away from selling means less orders and less profit.

Slide 12: Order Entry is Error Prone

Orders are error prone and can become less and less accurate the more time you are devoting to resolving errors which means less time for entering well-formed orders. It takes time to communicate and fix errors which costs money. Imagine the amount of time it takes to identify the error, communicate to the person handling the order and then fix the error. Revisiting an Order at any point after it’s submitted is a problem and it costs money. Even having to revisit orders at any time should bring up a red flag that could be an indication that other orders might be incorrect as well. And an order becomes more costly the longer the error goes unnoticed. Not only that, imagine completing and shipping an erroneous order to a customer.

Slide 13: Customer Dissatisfaction

We all want lots of happy customers. We want that are not only happy with the product or service we provided but the whole the experience. but the lack of well-formed orders will cause you and your customer dissatisfaction. It’s also important to note that error prone orders can cause delays which will dissatisfy your customers Not only that, customers who receive something that is wrong will be less likely to do business with you in the future. A dissatisfied customer may be willing to pay more from a competitor if they know they will receive a correct order the first time. Word of mouth can travel far and fast… So you don’t want dissatisfied customers to effect new and existing customers’ desire to business with you which effects your profits.

Slide 14: How Do Problems Happen?

So how do problem happen?

Slide 15: How Orders Go Wrong?

Rekey orders, Manual orders, and Free form orders cause order entry problems because it is easy for order information to be entered incorrectly or information can be completely missed There’s nothing more dissatisfying then having incorrect product information or shipping information, well except for completely missing information. Reducing or eliminating the need to rekey order information is critical. Not only that, you may even have manual orders that are difficult to rekey because the items on the manual order form are not defined in your order entry system. This could cause items to be incorrectly entered or not entered at all. And your stacks of manual order forms can easily become lost or missing.

Slide 16: How Orders Go Wrong? (continued)

How else do orders go wrong? Not standardizing order entry processes for different types of orders and different types of items. Different types of orders and items should be entered using a standardized set of processes. For example, how to handle custom orders versus program orders or maybe it’s information that you’re collecting to decorate a pen versus a t-shirt. Different rules are required for different orders and different items. Most importantly those rules need to be enforced. Especially in this industry because of the number variables related to every order. Different rules might be where something is decorated or how any item can be decorated. Automation is important because you no longer have to rely on someone remembering all your processes and rules. It takes all those standardized processes and business rules and applies them to your orders automatically. Let’s take a look at the t-shirt on the screen. This shirt needs to be decorated. We can clearly see where the shirt needs to be decorated from the example on the screen. But the person performing the decorating may not know where to decorate this shirt. By not having standardized processes and business rules defined for this item, you may end up with a shirt with a logo in the wrong place. You want that logo in the right place every time.

Slide 17: Touching Data

Orders also go wrong, more times people touch your information because you have a greater chance of an incorrect order. So let me introduce you to a bear. His name is Data. [Bring up bear] And for now Data and your order are at peace. But when you quote a customer, you touch Data or poke the bear in this case. [Finger 1] You want all that data to correct first time because you are going you convert that quote into a Sales Order which mean you are touch Data again. [Finger 2] Now consider if someone has to go back into that order and correct the product information or decoration requirements, that’s another person touches Data and poking the bear again[Finger 3] The more times you poke the bear, the more likely you might have missed a line item like a charge. [Finger 4] Or you have to correct a quantity [Finger 5] Or update pricing [Finger 6] With all that poking, it’s no wonder that Data gets disturbed and strikes back. All those data changes can seriously damage to your Order. And that costs you time and money to fix. Or worse, the mistakes make it all the way to the customer, which mean you have a bear of a problem on your hands becu8ase you are having to explain to the customer why they received the wrong item.

Slide 18: What Causes the Problems?

All of these problems involve manual processes. Manual steps will lead to errors. Errors that are time consuming and will dissatisfy your customers. Manually creating orders creates the opportunity to enter incorrect information or leave information out. Re-keying orders and not having standardized process and business rules or you’re not enforcing business rules create manual process. Order entry champions will want to eliminate manual processes and leverage automation. Manual processes come in all shapes and sizes and can appear at any time during the critical path, successful order entry champions are always evaluating their processes for any manual processes that exist.

Slide 19: What are the Solutions?

No one is looking to dissatisfy a customer, a lot of times it’s accidental. So what are the solutions? Being an Order Entry Champion will help you minimize the opportunity for problems to arise. Now we’re going to take a look at the solutions to those manual processes.

Slide 20: Orders all in One Place

Order Entry Champions need one place to enter orders electronically so that orders no longer have to be rekeyed from manual order forms. The orders don’t need to be rekeyed to be entered into another system like accounting. Not only will rekeying be a thing of the past, you will no longer have to track down and see the status of those orders because they are all centrally located. All those processes are manual. Successful order entry champions want one central location for all of their orders and they don’t want any manual processes.

Slide 21: Standardize and Enforce

Imagine all that time you will save if you’re able to take all of your order detail like product information, decoration requirements, and shipping information and And then apply all your standardized process and business rules. As a result, you have a well formed order. Your customers will be happy to know that you’ll be processing a well-formed order. Your orders will be more accurate and will be following all your standard processes and business rules. You’ll no longer have to worry about if the person entering the order remembered to considered all the rules associated with the type of order or the items being processed.

Slide 22: Automate Order Entry

Now let’s take your standardized processes and business rules to next level by taking all of the order detail such as Product Information, Artwork, Shipping Information, and any additional Charges that we talked about a few moments ago. And then automatically processing a well formed order that includes all your standard order processes and business rules being applied. Order Entry Champions need automation in the order entry process. You want your order entry process to be automated. An automated process requires fewer manual processes which reduces error opportunities. Your defaults and business rules will be enforced automatically. And updates or adjustments to orders will automatically trigger custom processes.

Slide 23: You Need an Integrated Order Entry System

The bottom line is… You Need an Integrated Order Entry System because it offers solutions that we just disuc

Slide 24: Integrated Order Entry

Integrated Oder Entry offer you the tools to process well-formed orders.

Slide 25: What are the Next Steps?

Here are some next steps to consider

Slide 26: Integrated Web Portal

In addition to having a integrated sales order entry solutions, you should also consider having integrated web portals that integrate with your Business Management System just like the example on the screen. Integrated web portals will allow even less manual processing because your customers can key in their own orders that will then flow through the critical path.

Slide 27: All Line Items are Represented

In your order entry system, you need to ensure that all of your line items are represented so that you can process well-formed orders. Those items might be something like a tape creation or flashing that are cost only. If all your items represented, that will reduce opportunities for items to be entered incorrectly or completely missed. This is also important from a order profitability standpoint because you need to account for everything that can effect the costs associated with your orders.

Slide 28: Define Processes and Rules

Define your standard processes and business rules You can start by defining all the types of orders that you process like the custom order example on the screen. and then create checklists to define your order configurations and processes as well as your business rules so that they can be automated.

Slide 29: Talk to Your Suppliers

Talk to your Suppliers We also recommend talking to your supplier to find out what’s well-formed for them Also find out what they need, so in turn you can get the information that they need from your customers

Slide 30: Solutions for You

Thank you, Will. Essent automates order entry. We are dedicated to helping the promotional products industry create Well-Formed Orders that save time and money for everyone. We can provide all the capabilities discussed today. And we’ll be happy to answer questions specific to your company. All you need to do is schedule a free consultation at essent.com/OrderEntry You can also email sales@essent.com or call 1-800-559-9959. Again, visit essent.com/OrderEntry to schedule a free session. Or reach out using sales@essent.com or 1-800-559-9959. Thanks again to everyone for attending today’s webinar, Order Like a Champion.