Sales Order Management - Challenges and Tips

This blog post is a deep dive on sales order management, particularly with how supply chain management professionals can help their companies' processes and procedures.

In general, order management consists of all the steps necessary to fulfill an order, from when the order is placed by the customers to when they receive their order, and it coordinates all steps contributing to a great customer experience. In addition, order management often requires collaboration and coordination with multiple partners, both for the inbound and outbound logistics processes. Relevant stakeholders along supply chains are producers, vendors, warehouses, transportation companies, distribution centers, and retailers.

SALES ORDER MANAGEMENT

First, sales order management refers to processes such as the sourcing of raw materials and inventory storage.

More concretely, this applies to businesses that have many customers placing many orders. This touchpoint with clients is extremely important for its implication on customer service and its underlying questions. How do customers place an order? How much transparency do customers get about product availability and delivery times? And how will fulfillment updates be sent? These questions are addressed by sales order management.

Sales orders affect Supply Chain Management directly as they influence stock, production, and delivery. Therefore, having knowledge and control of sales orders as early in the process as possible improves future steps in the supply chain.​

Unfortunately, in the B2B world, most orders are placed via e-mail, phone, WhatsApp, fax, WeChat, or similar channels. This represents a challenge since there’s no data structure standard and orders come in a very decentralized way. Even when orders are gathered in a central place, e.g. an ERP system, global corporates have to overcome the challenge of single regions, or even countries, working in different IT systems. Furthermore, the established process calls for sales teams to receive orders, but the actual fulfillment is carried out by logistics or supply chain management teams. All this likely leads to a disconnect inside the supply chain.

However, this disconnect can be solved so that consumers know whether a certain product is available and when it will be delivered. See below for some tips and tricks to achieve just that.

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Finally, having a deeper knowledge of all the steps that make up the supply chain, the challenges that can arise from each of them, and their possible solutions will help businesses to improve workflows, reduce costs, and provide a better customer experience.

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Logward is a Hamburg & Bangalore based logistics technology company.

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We build software, move containers, and change mindsets.

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If you have any questions or just want to say hi, reach out to mail@logward.com. Or you can book time with one of our logistics experts here.

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