The order-to-cash or OTC is a paramount business process that can make or break your business. It directly influences customer happiness. The more professional you are in managing the cash flow, the happier the customers are.
However, the OTC process is one of the most challenging processes to track as well as optimize due to its breadth and complexity. A strategic combination of automation and process mining is ideal to smoothen your existing OTC process.
Some of the common challenges OTC faces are:
- Bigger error rates for manual order entry. It needs time and costly rework.
- Poor maintenance of customer master data. It results in losing revenues and delays.
- Deliver fulfillment issues with an impact on customer retention rates.
- High days sales outstanding with an impact on cash flow. Businesses miss investment opportunities in other areas.
#1 Use process mining to re-evaluate your OTC process
Process mining directly connects your systems like SAP or ERP that interface with the OTC process. It is an analyzing and monitoring technique that captures all bottlenecks, process variation, exceptions, and reworks in an OTC process. Process mining enables you to view clearly what is happening inside a specific process. Thus, it figures out the root causes of failure and suggests recommendations for improvement.
#2 Deploy automation for quick progress
The fastest way to transform your OTC system is to implement robotic process automation (RPA) along with process mining. Especially, process mining helps you to find the automation potentials in your OTC process. For example with process mining, you have discovered that there are problems with your delivery. Your products take a lot of time to reach the end consumers. Upon digging it deeper you have found that your shipment specialist needs to handle too many orders at the same time. It creates problems with timely delivery. Then you can think of deploying robots or automation software to speed up the delivery process.
#3 Constantly monitor and enhance the overall process
Process mining is enduring.
While automating certain tasks in your OTC process, you can trace your roadblocks and progress with process mining. It ensures that your automation investment won’t go to waste. Process mining evaluates if your OTC cycle time is improving or not. Is your on-time delivery improving? Process mining can track all these metrics. It also suggests ‘other optimizing’ processes before initiating automation.
But process mining doesn’t stop there.
After automating your processes via RPA, you can use process mining to track results and ensure that automation is having the intended effect. It makes sense that after automating, you’d want some insight into the impact on the rest of the process. For example, is the process cycle time improving? Is your on-time shipping rate improving? These are all metrics that you can track with process mining, helping you continuously monitor and improve the process.
Sometimes a minor adjustment in the master data in your OTC system keeps customers happy.
Improve your Order to Cash process with CommerceCX
We help you to benchmark and enhance your OTC process with our Salesforce expertise. Our team of certified Salesforce professionals consults to study your existing OTC process and craft an enhancement strategy with a balance of automation and human resources. We make sure that every touchpoint of your OTC process gets streamlined to make customers happy without any hassle.
Talk to our experts today to enhance your OTC process.
About CommerceCX:CommerceCX is a global consulting, design, and development firm. We provide organizations with the solutions and services that support the transformation of a commerce ecosystem. We specialize in CRM, Quote-to-Cash, Lead to Cash, and have strong Salesforce, Apttus, and Microsoft Technologies expertise. Leveraging our solutions, organizations can connect technology, data, and insights to unify and enhance the buying, selling, and service experience that powers the commerce ecosystem.
