Industry Overview / Introduction

The high-tech industry is going through large-scale disruption. Value is migrating from products and devices to software platforms; Intense competition, extreme cost pressures, inefficient and fragmented processes, siloed data, and legacy systems are forcing businesses across the world to make changes. Then, there’s the unrelenting pace of technology change. 

Technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning are becoming pervasive, fundamentally changing the way companies operate. The advent of 5G, IoT, Blockchain, and NLP is adding to the potent mix of technologies driving profound change. Add to this, the ever-rising expectations of customers who want ‘anytime, anywhere’ service. 

At the heart of this complex environment lies an organization’s Order Management Process. 

Order Management Trends

• Subscription Economy – Customers today have new expectations and want to subscribe to outcomes they want, when they want them, rather than purchasing a product with ownership
• Seamless Customer Experiences – Customers expect seamless experience across various digital channels and want personalized and meaningful experiences
• Increased emphasis on speed – Customers wants their products and services delivered on-time and in full. Reduced Cycle Times
• Intelligent Data Management - Real-time visibility across end to end order journey and metrics
• Everything As-a-Service - The adoption of cloud has become rampant across industries and today customers expect the integrated stack of Tools, Technology and Services to be provided as an on-demand service

Today, customers demand greater supply chain agility. The adoption of multiple channels is creating new capacity and cost challenges, and complex global supply chains are increasingly impacted by disruptions. This is driving the need for transformation in product and service supply chains along three axes, namely:

• AGILITY - Greater focus on adoption of digital channels to deliver newer services & products, to improve reach and speed to market
• COST - Drive operational transformation to generate cost savings & process efficiencies augmented by increased capabilities in automation, analytics, and machine learning
• VISIBILITY - Enable end-to-end visibility of the supply chain, early warning signals, and post-event actions to align better with customer demand and manage impact of disruptions

In this article, we explore how transforming the Order to Invoice processes can assist supply chain and customer service leaders in evaluating, selecting, and implementing digital order management solutions driving hyper-efficiencies, enhanced customer experience, and end-to-end visibility across Order Management operations.

Challenges

Intense competition, extreme cost pressures, highly inefficient and fragmented processes, siloed data, legacy systems, and demanding customers are forcing businesses to make many changes. Mergers and acquisitions are adding even more complexity to the business and IT landscape. In many cases, businesses are responding by investing huge sums of money, resources, and effort into improving the status quo, only to find that they are still falling far short of expected business benefits, customer growth and satisfaction goals.

With Digital Evolution, there is a need for companies to rapidly transform the supply chain and order management operations as an accelerated differentiator for growth to better serve existing customers, in addition to opening new emerging markets and industries. This presents us with a unique opportunity to leverage our practical expertise and experience in customer value chain planning and execution to:

• Arrive at a set of razor-sharp solutions to solve specific operational and business challenges
• Improve the health and ability for our customers to compete effectively
• Guide and help lead the change initiatives, and,
• Optimize business value from sub-optimal technology implementations

Our approach / methodology / solution

Order Management is all about making the process – from order receipt to sales order creation to sourcing the components to delivering the finished goods & services to the customer – more efficient, reliable, and transparent. Breaking down silos and bringing innovation to all corners of the enterprise is necessary to survive in an environment with short product cycles and markets where companies quickly rise and fall.

At Wipro, we have designed a Digital Order Management cloud-based solution that can digitally transform your global business operations in sales order management and supply chain. 

Our Design Principles bring together Outside-In thinking and the Inside-Out enablement capability, enabling digital transformation to achieve seamless customer experience, low-touch to zero-touch processing, reduced cycle times, ability to monitor operations in real time, thereby increasing accuracy and compliance in all transactions.

Making Digital Order Management Work for You

Today’s executives are all asking similar questions of their Sales Order Management. “How do I get to the next generation of Zero-Touch Sales Order Management Operations?” Executives want to know how to realize more value, how to expand services, how to enhance customer experience, how to drive zero waste, and how to drive continuous process improvement initiatives.

The core solution can be designed to not only deliver an innovative and cost-effective model but also provide a progressive and de-risked approach to operations through rationalization and automation leading to best-in-class delivery capabilities.

Simplify Business Processes - Organizations should focus on driving process simplification, harmonization, and rationalization of business processes with the help of Quality Framework, which is a combination of Lean, Six Sigma, and Kaizen. Elements like process control, process audits, and transaction monitoring will ensure that resources deliver a consistent experience to customers.  To move to the next generation of sales order management, organizations must assess the maturity level of their current business processes and determine the best path to achieve standardization and harmonization.

Some of the key initiatives organizations should undertake include:

• Define check points for standard input/ information from Customers / Sales teams across all channels
• Enable catalog-driven order management boosting agility and responsiveness - single, standardized repository of all transactions based on customer segmentation, product, country etc.
• Identify End-to-End Process Flows per the Complexity & Models to Uniform Order Categorization
• Focus on smart identification and removal of operational inefficiencies
• Build a unified global operating model with standardized roles, activities, and performance accountabilities
• Enable Seamless Collaboration between partners, operations, and customers
• Drive Role Localization - Deploy best-shored resource assignment to achieve optimum market intimacy in the most efficient fashion
• Deploy full order journey tracking across order milestones
• Enable mass processing capabilities in order to gain speed and efficiencies as well as manage unplanned demand fluctuations

Leverage Technology Interventions - Technology has made our world an incredibly interconnected “system of systems” and enabled a new age of multi-modal boundless collaboration that opens up almost endless possibilities across the entire supply chain. Leverage in-house or partner’s investment in edge technologies like Intelligent BPM, Artificial Intelligence, RPA & Smart Scripts automating order management processes to reduce costs, achieve hyper-efficiencies and improve service levels.  

Technology interventions that organizations should evaluate to eliminate manual activities and enable intelligent machine interactions:  

• Intelligent BPM – for Workflow Orchestration and intelligent case management
• Robotics Process Automation: To achieve market-leading performance shifts in transaction execution workflow
• Smart OCR : Capturing and codifying unstructured inputs to structured inputs from physical paper records, image files, PDF documents etc.,
• Artificial Intelligence - predict supply and demand events that may impact the customer delivery requirements and recommend actions to ensure the customer delivery requirements are met
• Implement Auto-KCIs (SMS/Email): Critical customer updates through triggered activation
• Deploy Intelligent Virtual Assistant: Smart chat facility
• Deploy Predictive Milestone Failure Alerts: Early warning of potential supply disruptions
• Digitize SOPs and create a single integrated repository of all operational documentation - Transactional histories, business intelligence, and guided libraries

Apply Analytics to gain Customer and Operational Insights – Along with gaining valuable customer and operational insights with the help of historical transactional data, organizations can also deliver actionable and fact-based insights that will aid in conducting intelligent analysis & will make it not only easier to visualize and interpret the data, but also to understand the reason behind patterns. The solution should include Data Visualization, Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics, Business Intelligence & Reporting.

Initiatives that organizations should take to reduce cost structure, improve efficiency, responsiveness, and predictable decision-making.  

• Deploy End-to -Analytics - Powerful core- and expanded analytics capabilities ranging from predictive to prescriptive
• Implement Real-time Dashboards- Order analytics framework to gain end-to-end visibility with any device
• Enable Sales through Service Prediction- Buying pattern recognition to enhance future sales interactions
• Ability to build Customized Reports Drill down from Region > Country > Process > Team > Agent level  
• Milestone-level performance drilldown – Cycle time between stages, Fulfilment and revenue realization tracking by value, Predictive service level against Customer requested delivery date
• Deploy Smart Operations - For Smart Tracking & Visual Management
• Customer Satisfaction (NPS Analytics) - Act on detractor risk to avoid revenue losses

Innovate - It is no longer acceptable to be an exceptional implementer; instead, you must innovate to stand out in the crowd. How can you elevate customer service while reducing cost and increasing profit? Doing what you used to do better will not cut it! You must innovate.

Leverage Blockchain for Order Management and fulfilment process that provides end-to-end visibility and unparalleled data validation for order management with touchless invoice generation for participants in the SCM value chain. Select features should include:

• Near-real time availability of relevant data on the shared ledger
• Transparent collaboration of disparate parties in the business network
• Smart contract enabled validation & business rules
• Secured, shared immutable registry that becomes a “source of truth” for the process state
• Peer-to-peer model which integrates different enterprises over a common network
• Near real-time tracking of moving assets
• Automatic inventory check and adjustment against orders
• Automatic invoice generation & reconciliation

In summary, working on these initiatives will see an impact on both the top and bottom lines

Looking forward, into the future

In today’s era of high customer expectations, businesses naturally aspire to the highest levels of service, from order confirmation to guaranteed delivery dates. At the same time, it’s imperative that they develop the ability to secure business continuity—to anticipate and mitigate possible supply chain disruptions, both local and global, that can range from political to environmental to economic, and can seriously disrupt operations without warning.

Yes, most companies have invested in sophisticated technologies and systems within the confines of their own organization; and many have gone further, expanding to include point-to-point connections with external partners. But if businesses are to successfully deliver both quality customer service and business continuity, they must take a new approach to Order management— specifically, the ability to orchestrate customers, partners, suppliers, and distributors to a level of accuracy unheard of just a few years ago. Achieving that requires a shift to a singular view of services among all entities that touch the order management value chain.

V. Karthik Viswanadham

Practice Manager, Supply Chain Management, Wipro

Karthik Viswanadham is a seasoned Order Management and Supply Chain professional with 17 years of cross-functional experience in partnering with clients across business domains such as digital transformation, automation, customer experience enhancement, business strategy, B2B/B2C consulting, and enablement of sales support operations. His industry focus includes verticals such as Hi-Tech, Manufacturing, Medical Devices & Telecom.