Sales order processing is the steps from purchase to delivery. While sales order processing challenges can vary from business to business as well as for different industries the current supply chain crisis has only made the process harder to manage.
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Poll results
In our most recent LinkedIn poll, we asked our social media followers what their biggest sales order processing challenge was. The options were: managing expectations, customer responsiveness, handling exceptions, and other. Continue reading to discover what we found.
Sales order processing challenges: what we found
Managing expectations
29% of respondents selected managing expectations as the biggest challenge of sales order processing.
With almost a third of respondents highlighting managing expectations as their biggest challenge, this highlights the impact of the Covid-19 supply chain crisis. As deliveries became delayed due to industries halting production, and strikes impacting delivery, managing the expectation to the end customer became harder as the chain was bottlenecked at several stages with no insight into completion as these challenges hadn’t been seen at this level before. Setting realistic expectations became key, with many businesses investing in automation to help remove unpredictable manual processes. This continues to be a key investment for organisations into 2023 as they look to understand how they can manage expectations once again.
Customer responsiveness
29% of respondents picked customer responsiveness as their greatest challenge when it came to sales order processing.
Customer responsiveness is often a manual interaction between businesses. As employees take time to complete a manual task, delays can occur as a result of waiting. With trends such as the great resignation, businesses could be without staff for extended periods. Equally due to Covid-19 sickness, organisations found that they didn’t have the staff numbers to be as efficient as they normally would be. This meant business to business sales were waiting for customer responsiveness for a lot longer than they’d have previously been used to.
Handling exceptions
14% selected handling exceptions as their organisation’s biggest challenge.
There are often a variety of exceptional situations businesses need to consider when it comes to their sales orders. These can be situations such as campaigns or seasons, which could spike a few weeks at the time. While some of the time these are caused by internal factors, external factors such as competitors, the changing market or the economy will also impact them. Being able to have an efficient exception management process in place is key to managing successful sales orders and improving customer service.
Other
Finally, 29% selected ‘other’ as the greatest sales order processing challenge.
As mentioned in the introduction, the challenges for businesses change from business to business or for different industries. In this case other could have been selected for sales order challenges in changing and recovering from issues between orders and deliveries. Issues will always arise, whether this is from internal or external errors, to be able to recover the situation quickly requires the ability to retrace the process and correct the issues then restart the process quickly, updating the customer throughout. This requires a system that can handle this amount of change, with employees capable of the process. Many businesses when hit with the supply chain crisis were unable to manage this.
More information
B2BE’s experience in the supply chain sector allows our customers to build, expand and adapt successfully, enabling greater effectiveness. To engage with B2BE and offer feedback on what matters most to you and your business, make sure to follow us on LinkedIn and across social media. You can also vote in our latest LinkedIn poll. If you’d like to discuss your supply chain strategy, get in touch with us.