This blog offers a holistic overview of the Order-to-cash process in the Medtech industry.
According to a report, the OTC cycle in the medical device industry is long. It takes a lot of time for an implant to reach the patient from the manufacturing company. This is one of the crucial pain points the medical device industry faces today for the conventional method of implant order capturing and communication. It’s high time for the MedTech industry to leverage mobile and digital technologies to enhance information capturing and faster communication.
It takes approximately 60 days to complete an order in the MedTech industry, and when things go wrong, it extends to more than 90 days. Other pain areas of this industry’s order management process are lost orders, disputes in billing, extra shipping cost/RMAs, and unnecessary sales time to resolve conflicts. Futile finance time and customer services while resubmitting order is one of the industry’s major issues at present.
Since technology disruption in the healthcare sector, the MedTech industry has been growing. It includes all the medical devices that simplify prevention, diagnosis, and disease treatment. The well-known MedTech products are imaging instruments, dialysis machines, implants, and pacemakers, amongst others. The market of size of the global MedTech market is $430 billion and continues to grow.
What is Order-to-Cash in the MedTech industry?
Being an indispensable part of the Quote to Cash process, OTC helps your MedTech business concentrate on a more client-centric approach. Additionally, it allows businesses to predict revenues by ensuring accurate billing and cash flow.
The process order-to-cash plays a significant role in the MedTech industry by filling the gap between healthcare and technology. Every day, all healthcare organizations, including hospitals, clinics, labs, and community wellness centers, use a wide range of medical equipment to diagnose illness and offer the best patient care to the people.
Order to cash or OTC is a business process that covers the order management system in any organization. A standard order management system starts with customers placing orders. While OTC encompasses various stages starts with order placing and end with report generating. The steps are order management, credit management, order fulfillment, order shipping, customer invoicing, account receivables, payment collection, and reporting and data management. OTC makes the traditional order management process smarter and more streamlined with analytics and reporting. OTC even smoothen the processes while merging MedTech companies if you know all the optimizing tips.
Best Order-to-Cash Practices
The order management processes vary from company to company. Hence, order-to-cash integration is! However, the industry has defined some order-to-cash best practices:
Setup Standards for Your Whole Company
Setting up standards in your organization ensures consistency in running things smoothly in tandem with your growth. When you build steps to decrease the cycle time in the order-to-cash process, it increases the working capital amount. The availability of more working capital reduces your financial stress.
Streamline all your systems
Your business runs on many computer systems, and some of them run independently. Such independent computer systems increase the length of your order-to-cash cycle. When you streamline your computer systems, it shortens your OTC cycle and decreases potential errors. Fully streamlining your ordering, fulfillment, billing, and payment may take time, but it can save your valuable time. Additionally, an automatic order management system ensures accuracy in every stage.
Evaluate and Monitor your process regularly
Evaluating and monitoring your processes at a regular interval is crucial to prevent any failure in advance. There are common chances of your team making mistakes while entering orders and create a bottleneck in the whole OTC process. If you frequently resolve the issues and monitor the process, there will be less scope of any constraint.
Benefits of OTC on your MedTech business
Optimizing your OTC with the right technology tool can benefit your MedTech business in many ways. Some of them are discussed below:
Automate your medical device orders
Handling bulk medical device orders create a lot of mess with human fault and errors. However, if you implement the order-to-cash process, it can automatically manage your medical devices’ demands and deliver the same on time with accurate billing and reporting.
Accurate credit management
OTC integration decreases issues in your credit management system. It empowers your MedTech organization to auto-apply credit in the respective applicable segments. Moreover, you can create custom credit approval rules in your approach to auto-approve or deny credits. With such transparent credit management, you can have a clear understanding of account receivable and cash flow.
Auto-fill your medical device orders
Order-to-cash offers automated inventory management software. It updates automatically counts your medical device inventory in real-time. This helps you to take orders that you can fulfill. If your customer mistakenly places orders, it immediately flags the ‘out-of-stock’ tag to alert your customers to cancel orders.
Ship your medical equipment on time
Order-to-cash is your medical device shipping assistant helps in auditing the shipping on time. It gives immediate updates to audits. It empowers to plan and deliver the medical equipment to the customers on time.
Accurate and timely customer invoicing.
If you are facing invoicing delays, you must integrate order-to-cash into your order lifecycle. This supports your MedTech organization to send correct invoices in no time. It fastens up the management process where your finance dept can predict accurate cash flow.
Timely Payment Collection
OTC automates your accounting system to collect payment for your medical device orders on time. It clears all the mismanagement and flaws in the order management system. Furthermore, OTC keeps tracks of unpaid invoices and official lapsing.
Data Management and Reporting
Order-to-cash re-engineers your conventional order management system with intelligent analytics. It monitors your medical equipment ordering process in every process. By analyzing the data, you can make intelligent business decisions with forecasting.
Read here to know everything about how OTC changes your business.
Power of the OTC Process
The OTC process is robust and can change the order management system in your Medtech organization. It ensures a clean order entry system with correct pricing and inventory requests.
Some of the other powers of the OTC process are:
- Removes manual re-entry of data
- Save 60% order processing time
- Erase extra shipping costs ordering mistakes
- Higher productivity of the sales team
- Lower accounts receivable write-offs
Why optimize your Order-to-cash with CommerceCX?
At CommerceCX, we have been working with the leading MedTech companies to smoothen their customer experience by optimizing their existing OTC processes. We create the baseline for your digital transformation journey with prominent technology partnership with Salesforce. We are supported by a team of certified Salesforce professionals to understand your custom requirements and design solutions accordingly. We are a trusted advisor in the Order-to-cash optimization process.
For any Order-to-Cash requirements, feel free to contact us.
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.
