Challenge
A $400M wholesale clothing manufacturer was encountering sales order processing challenges that threatened to drive 7-figure cost increases.
The Problem
- Email orders from their customers required high-touch, manual processing
- These orders were a significant time burden to process, requiring 50% of the inside sales team’s time
- The manual efforts required impacted the team’s ability to provide quality service
- The lack of scalability in their sales process restricted the manufacturer’s potential for growth
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The Opportunity
Our tech build team began the process by performing a 6-week assessment to better understand the problem, document current-state processes, and identify potential technology solutions that already existed in the marketplace. The assessment resulted in an important finding: no enterprise stacks were capable of handling this manufacturer’s volume of complex, unstructured sales order documents.
Next steps: Given the lack of out-of-the-box solutions, the tech build team presented the manufacturer with the opportunity to work with Point B as their technology solution provider. To better illustrate the possibilities for future-state order processing—one without the expensive, manual efforts they had previously been using—the team developed a proof-of-concept prototype solution. After a quick demo, the manufacturer decided to move forward with the tech build team’s custom-built solution.
Our Approach
In just five months, the tech build team was able to develop an intelligent automation solution that seamlessly integrated into the manufacturer's existing enterprise systems, parsed and processed sales order data, and automated critical parts of the intake process. New automations included:
1
Processing complex, unstructured text from various order formats Â
2
Retrieving order details from customers’ portalsÂ
3
Recording order data in CRM systems Â
4
Notifying customers of orders that contain errors Â
5
Verifying product availability, pricing details, product attributes, and moreÂ
The intelligent matching engine and business rules created across customer domain objects ensured that customers with special requests were always serviced according to their preferences. Equipped with the right intelligence and automation capabilities, the solution reduced previously burdensome and manual work without any negative impact on customers’ existing order experience.
Project Outcomes
Now a critical part of their sales process, this solution handles 90% of orders without any manual intervention. Year over year, it processes over 500,000 orders representing more than $120M in sales. The tool has enabled the manufacturer to:
- Achieve a cost avoidance of $4M
- Reduce the average order processing time from 10 minutes to 10 seconds
- Free up the team capacity equivalent of 20+ FTEs
- Meet SLAs and drive ongoing customer experience improvements
- Scale and grow their business
Since its adoption, 170 customers have been onboarded to the platform with ongoing requests from the manufacturer to onboard additional customers.
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