The Challenge
In an increasingly competitive market, overcoming operational inefficiencies is crucial to maintaining growth and profitability. A $400M wholesale clothing manufacturer faced significant price increases from their sales order processing that threatened to drive 7-figure cost increases.
The Problem:
- Email orders from their customers required high-touch, manual processing
- Given the high volume, these orders were a significant time burden to process, requiring 50% of the inside sales team’s time
- The time required for this work impacted the team’s ability to invest in other areas and provide quality service experiences
- The lack of scalability in their sales process restricted the manufacturer’s potential for growth
The Opportunity
Our tech build team set out to reimagine this process by performing a 6-week assessment to understand the problem, better 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 could handle this customer’s volume of complex, unstructured sales order documents.
Next steps: Given the lack of out-of-the-box solutions, the tech build team partnered with the manufacturer as their technology solution provider. To better illustrate the possibilities for future-state order processing—one without their current expensive and manual efforts—the team developed a proof-of-concept prototype solution. After a quick demo, the manufacturer saw the possibilities this solution would unlock and was eager to experience its full impact on their sales process.
Our Approach
In just 5 months, the tech build team developed an intelligent automation solution that seamlessly integrated into their existing enterprise systems, parsed and processed sales order data, and automated critical parts of the intake process. New automation included:
1
Processing complex, unstructured text across order formats
2
Retrieving order details from disparate customer portals
3
Recording order data in their CRM system
4
Notifying customers of errors within orders
5
Verifying product availability, pricing details, and product attributes
The intelligent matching engine and business rules created across customer domain objects ensured that customers with special requests could be consistently serviced according to their preferences. Equipped with the right intelligence and automation capabilities, the solution reduced previously burdensome and manual work while maintaining an excellent customer ordering experience.
Project Results
Now a critical part of their sales process, this solution handles 90% of orders without 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 order processing time from 10 minutes to 10 seconds
- Decrease their cost per order by 90%+
- Free up the team capacity equivalent of 45+ FTEs
- Meet SLAs and drive ongoing customer experience improvements
- Scale and grow their business
Since its adoption, more than 170 customers have been onboarded to the platform, and the manufacturer is still working through additional customers to be onboarded.
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