Automated sales order processing for organizations

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foreign generation everyone um today I'm going to be talking about a different document type that we spend um some time looking at so a lot of what we do is around intelligent document processing um a lot of the podcasts up until this date have had a leaning towards invoice processing and today I'm going to talk a little bit more about sales order processing I'm joined by Josh our head of Technology again um if you could just give us a quick introduce introduction again Josh please that'd be great absolutely yeah so I'm Josh a head of Technology at Spectrum I've been with the organization for probably about 11 years now uh working from delivering solutions to our customers uh now in a position where I'm I'm looking after our automation teams our technical teams who deliver the solution to our customers uh making sure they've got the right Technologies and support but also making sure I've got one eye forward in the market to make sure we're not losing track of where technology is going it moves so fast it moves so quickly we want to make sure that we're at the Forefront of the technology bringing it into business and business Automation and not just delivering the same solutions kind of on a repeated basis really okay that makes a lot of sense yeah there was um I think what was the first podcast that I did with um with JV we were kind of talking high level about um kind of Discovery process and naturally kind of become flowed into so the problems that we see um you know accounts payable departments having when processing um invoices and um one of the things that I'm Keen to to get across to our um to our listener listen to people to watch us is that we're not a couple of one trip only as it were um and so yeah we absolutely work with all sorts of transactional documents but one of the biggest kind of growth areas um for us that I see at the moment is not in the accounts payable team um it's in the it's in the sales team or the sales order processing team so the sales Ledger versus the purchase Ledger sort of thing and I know we've been um kind of um delivering sales order processing solutions for a while now but it just seems to be picking up some speed in terms of that's what what clients kind of coming to us and talk to us about so um just like the the accounts payable team has got problems post and processing invoices the sales admin teams or the um the sales teams have our problems um processing them coming sales orders the challenge is tend to be that I see um tend to be a bit different and we still got the whole idea of using data sets of information to um to recognize data from from um from an order there tends to be a bit quicker of a turnaround on an order for me so whereas an invoice you're probably going to have kind of query handling take days or even weeks orders really need to go into the system straight away what are the kind of differences of you who um have you have you seen between invoice processes and sales order processing you think yeah so I think one of the biggest things that we look at in that process and you touching it there about it almost being a bit more reactive on the sales side is you've got to get that feeling back out to who is your customer of have you ever received your order yes we've processed it guess we've got the stock I know we don't uh whereas accounts payable there's a bit of freedom because you've usually got a 14 to 30 day kind of payment terms there you can pass that around the business with a bit more uh a bit more time but ultimately the sales order processing side it's that initial channel of information coming in that's probably the biggest change uh look at one process to the other accounts payable you're looking at usually paper documents and quite standard formats of documents more often than not as part of that process whereas the sales side it really varies it could be a relatively standard document that purchased all the requests that comes through from the uh from the customer itself for those goods could be just a handwritten email it could be some expectation that there's a portal there and maybe some more kind of live chat it could be the salesperson's coming from some kind of account review or whatever it might be depending on the type of business within order to raise it's a bit more kind of free and and fluid I guess from that point of view so for sales order processing it's very much a different start of the process and it's looking at that and understanding what's the key area to focus on for automation there because there are Technologies out there that you could start with any of those we could offer portals and we do look at portals with one of our strategic Partners around sales order processing but it's also the document side there's also that free text side and with things like you know chat GPT and modern large language models you know can we do things with those that might then help that processing even if it's just 20 30 40 of reject reduction processing time there to automate the The Taking of that information and turning it into an order there's also a lot more bespoke rules that come into sales order processing accounts payable it's very much a rigid process to approve we know who's going to go there but sales because ultimately it's the nature of the business coming in you want to be flexible with your customers you want to make sure you're offering the best service the best pricing is often more of a different Price Books tiered pricing exceptions gold level customers that might have different standards delivery locations and terms lots of rules that come into play and sell sort of process that make it quite complex but if you can automate those rules again you're just turning around order after order and a customer's almost getting a instantaneous response back there on feedback rather than it being a queue of Service agents taking hours of time processing orders uh even to just say yeah sorry we don't have the stock for that and as a customer at the other end of the phone or they're in the email having a delay of of days and some in some instances um to find out they've not actually got the stuff well that's a real kick in the teeth um so we can take that and give a faster turn around that's it that's a huge return for the customer experience not just for the experience internally there as well so we've managed to get all the way through five episodes without talking about GPT and large language models but you have to happen at some point today yeah absolutely yes I think you're absolutely right that's um definitely one of the things I see pre-sales is that um when we go out to talk to people they've got lots of different channels for orders coming through you've got that idea of having a semi-structured document and we took semi-structured PDF type documents on invoices with with JV um previously and and in order follows the same some of the same um rules as an invoice does that's one of the things that we talked about was the fact that you know when you're looking at templated versus templateless Solutions then the template list Solutions understand that semi-structure of a document that it's got a header that it's got a a table of items that it might have some information in the footer um and an order is very similar isn't it to an invoice in the fact that you'll have that delivery address in the top and the top of the order probably you'll have that order number that order date um you'll have that table of items that the um the customers wanting to place um on order with you and then possibly some footer information down there as as well so very similar approach I suppose in our automation Tool Set uh capturing um incoming sales orders that it would be for for invoices um and it's interesting that you mentioned then those um completely unstructured documents in the form of an email because that's something that we've not really covered on the podcast yet and there's there's lots of um bits of our tool set that can be used to um to look at unstructured data but we're obviously always looking for for new tools to be able to assist with that and I think you were doing some kind of proof of concept in recently weren't you with um with using large language models from turning a a kind of handwritten email as it were into a tabular um data that starts to create an order absolutely and the technology advancement there in helping humans in the day-to-day role just through natural language is really starting to excel in the number of applications in business is growing alongside the technology growth as well um so just being you know I mentioned it earlier around that automation rate the technology is getting better and better and it's becoming quite frankly scary but it's not at the point where it's going to remove a human in the process but what it can do is take that input and it can help reduce the effort and almost give a human an indicator to say can you double check this rather than just fully automating that process so if we can take a almost a shopping list and I did see this while doing the proof of concept from one of our uh one of our customers an email that came in that was 60 70 lines from a chef with a shopping list of two onions and four cloves of garlic or whatever it might be and taking that really unstructured email and turning it into a very structured table form of unit of measures prices quantities uh product descriptions Etc um and being able to do something systematically with that is a huge advancement even if it does need that human in the loop still to verify that information yeah it's all about making it more efficient for the humans get involved isn't it at that point yes it might not do a um you know a job of getting every single single part of that email written up into a perfect um table so it can go kind of straight through processing without any human intervention but you know if it makes more sense of it it's got to be easier to read a table of items than it has to read paragraph that somebody's kind of typed in or a big long list like that isn't it 100 and it's even to the point where you know we maybe don't see this as humans in day to day if I go back to that scenario for the shopping list yeah I want two garlic okay well what garlic is that is that garlic puree garlic cloves is that you know roasted garlic you know what kind of garlic is that and it's always going to need to be the human intervention there until we can build in the system rules to understand okay based on this buying history for this particular customer when they say garlic it means this type of garlic or whatever it might be um just to kind of Aid the system but ultimately keying in 70 lines of older information is going to be a significant amount of time front is a huge time saving even if it's not like you said straight through processing yeah okay great so I think we're probably it's probably fair to say that we're more focused on those um semi-structured kind of attached um PDF documents that of obviously somebody from the purchasing team has typed that into their um their Erp system or their ordering system and that's generated that that document back to say this is what we want for a term to order as it were so yeah going back to that so we've got the same kind of approach in terms of data sets as well haven't we so it's important to have data sets of information there's less on the page that we're likely to know up front because you know there's not going to be with an invoice you might have a corresponding order you might have a corresponding receipt we don't we're not going to be able to predict what the customer is asking for um but we might be able to predict these are their delivery locations that they've given us previously so using that idea of Master data to um to find the delivery locations and what other kind of Master data do we use within the sales order processes or anything else to do with the product looks at the table the tables or anything else yeah so a bit of a combination really and we see some of these complexities in accounts payable as well as the order side but you mentioned their customer customer delivery addresses uh you're gonna have ultimately the products that we're matching to but you're also probably going to have different variants of those products as well so for example if it's cans of Coca-Cola um you might come in six packs 18 packs whatever it might be so using that information that exists in your product catalog as well to understand why they're ordering that size of that product or that color of that product so it's cleaning gloves an example it's really important to supplement that as well as part of that matching criteria so that's really important and getting that data up front as I'm sure you probably mentioned in one of the previous podcasts on AP getting that data up front as clean as possible as populated as possible with all those different types of information it's really important to get that straight through processing red but as you mentioned there with with sales orders it's not an expected document it's not a company in order that you've created so there may need to be with these automation Solutions a period of time where you're supplementing that and whether we build that into the solutions to learn the relationship between your product code and the customer's product code or product descriptions and product codes whatever it might be um there's a bit element of retaining that information and gaining that knowledge within the solution that then gives you that straight through through processing later on down the line whereas accounts payable often you can start off quite early in the process of matching that to orders quite reliably and not necessarily happen to build that up albeit they might still need to be a process of populating supplier information that wasn't there previously yeah it's certainly one of the things that I talk about pre-sales is this whole idea of matching product codes and you know you'll find a lot of Erp systems are able to collate that information so you know this is the the product code that we stock our items in this is what my customer uses and if I see one or the other I can translate it backwards and forwards between those two but often and you know that information doesn't exist at this point and it's somebody kind of handballing and the orders knowing intuitively when they see that particular product code from their customer this is what they mean or you know this is what they ordered previously so I know this is likely to be what pack size they want to order in the future sort of thing it's having that knowledge locked in people's head that can be a bit of a challenge can't it there's it's difficult to um to make that kind of uh you know computer to be able to work in that way um but using data sets and across restaurants and information can um can help along the way and and certainly once you've got that systemized there's a lot less risk than having it somebody stuck in somebody's head as it were and only having experience being able to dictate how these orders are processed yeah plus there's the ability there to to use that data to help inform the user on things that they might not have spotted previously if it's a pricing discrepancy for example if we're looking at a product that's always been purchased regularly at a particular price but then all of a sudden that product gets ordered at a different price well should we be accepting that in the system automatically just because the part number matches should we be allowing that and not flagging it up and saying maybe they've raised it internally as the same park club or maybe they're down in the 18 pack because it's the price of the 18 pack rather than the price of the six pack or whatever it might be so building in those checking processes that into the solution is really important as well not just capturing that information but highlighting some of those things that could easily be missed by human eye and I as part of that processing yeah I think one of the other things that um customers tell me about sales order processing is things like delivery charges as well isn't it I think you mentioned it earlier on but you know if the delivery address is suggesting that that area is that delivery area is out of area and there might need to be additional charges put onto it that's a one less thing that somebody needs to keep an eye on them they're thinking about isn't it yeah so if you can pass that information to the Erp system in the say you know this needs an additional charge because it's out of area that's only going to help speed that process up 100 and you know we see things like that delivery charge is small delivery charges you know if there's a particular order point where the customer needs to reach to have delivery knocked off or to skip this more delivery charge I mentioned about goals and customers this concept in some Industries about ABC customers where you know there's a different price lists or preferential rates or processing times or whatever it might be in building those logic rules into the system so that again the user is focused about matching the discrepancies and not dealing with Core Business logic of this is how we charge our customers or this is how we make sure the processing happens just removes that that potential for error or lost Revenue in some in this instances because we're not charging carriage or we're charging the wrong amount of carriage and all of a sudden now we're stuck with a hundred pound bill of sticking it over to the Cayman Islands or whatever it might be or the British Isles instead of you know down the road and we can send one of the van drivers to do it instead yeah that makes that makes a lot of sense I was talking to a customer the other day that kind of loosely doing some manufacturing but they were buying um kind of adhesives and things in and then and kind of um manufacturing them into other products for their customers and one of the challenges that they had was that sometimes that kind of that delay between receiving an order and actually getting it into the manufacturing process might mean that they're at risk of not meeting expected delivery dates you know they they work their customers quite often tell them we must have this product in our hands by this particular date and so you know and because they've got quite complex orders and because somebody needs to have a look at what materials are required and then schedule it into the manufacturing process and all those sorts of things by the time it's got through that process or at least got some visibility of that then they might not be able to actually meet the the delivery date um I think that's one of the other really important things that doesn't just risk that particular order being lost it also means that potentially in the future that customer might not be a return customer so speed of delivery of those orders or at least order acknowledgments is going to be really really important isn't it 100 I mentioned it earlier in terms of expected feedback if you're there as a buyer wanting to order a particular set and if it's a factory scenario like that and you need it at a particular Point getting that responsive yeah we can't deliver that at that point is really important because it's the difference between getting a response at half past five and therefore not getting the delivery because you know I've got time to fund supplier B to try and get the products and therefore the Factories at a stop uh all because of the way that that audit was processed so if you can even just improve the customer experience and I mentioned that earlier about the difference between that internal employee experience and the customer experience accounts payable it's really all about improving the experience for your staff personally invoices isn't a fun thing to do it's a quite a boring task taking information off paper and any process like that is is not particularly interesting for users whereas for the other side on the sales side it's very much more about the experience as well as the employee experience but making sure that you're keeping your customers happy engaged you're maybe inviting more instances there to to bring other things in again we could automate things like automatic discounts or free products for samples in that process the entice customers coming in if it's automated which again could get missed if it's an internal thing upsell opportunities that kind of thing as well trying to just build that relationship with the customer rather than just be there as as processing whatever that's for yeah I think one of the things that I've noticed as well is that they tend to be more simple than AP in some respects they're more complex than AP in other respects yeah um so you know the work the actual workflow in the background tends to involve less people so whereas with them an AP solution an invoice you might have the purchasing department getting involved with um you know feeding back on a pricing query you might have a good seat a good Zin team involved with um feeding back on receipt issue you've obviously got the AP team involved so it's very kind of cross-divisional and cross Department pencil isn't it whereas with sales order processing it tends to be kind of the sales admin team that whoever that might have to hold that role gets involved with kind of the workflow as it were so the workflow tends to be simpler from an engaging with a user point of view but maybe a bit more complex around adding those things in like small delivery charges and minimum order quantities there's more business rules in the background in some respects isn't it to automate but um but yeah the people involved are a smaller set of people absolutely absolutely and I guess that all depends on that business process when we come in we can understand that business process to make sure we've got it in the right way if you've got back-to-back deliveries configured in your Erp system there's maybe not a need in the workflow process to pass it off to the goods in team to understand all the warehousing team to understand whether this stock there again if that's automated already in your process it simplifies that but again we can always tailor the solution to handle those scenarios where if stock quantities are lower than a certain threshold or don't meet the requirements of delivery is there a case there we pass that out to a different team to review first can we get our own internal buyers bringing that product in fast enough to bring that back out again for the customer or do we need to reject that order as well okay almost a good level of sense and yeah and then the process is exactly the same for us isn't it in terms of Discovery tailored demonstration all the things that we talked about in terms of statement of Works creation user stories process mapping it's all just all relevant isn't it regardless of whether the transactional document's an invoice or whether it's a whether it's an order yeah absolutely we'll always tackle every solution with exactly the same process and I don't know whether it's something we've discussed in previous podcasts at this point but the technologies that we use are also you know very flexible to tackle whatever it is we might need to tackle whether it's intelligent document processing and picking up contracts such as invoices versus passports or whatever it might be versus the workflow automating any business process electronic forms digitizing any piece of paper we're not stuck in a very rigid process if we could only automate these things but we need to stay flexible enough that we can gather the requirements for all these different types of processes as well and we've got a really good way of handling that regardless of the process or document or people involved as well yeah so important important um note there really are our products are platform products that can be used for lots of different processes so once you've bought it to do one thing once you've got it up and running once it's once it's working then it's then know what's the next opportunity for is it in the sales um against the sales Ledger is it statement reconciliation is it remittances just to get that maximum value from those products that you've already bought into absolutely you've already got that in the business you've already brought that change into into the business and often what we find you know this might be capture it might be workflow it might be business intelligence when people start to get sight of the automation that's brought in people start thinking well why can't I have that in my department again whether it's HR sales Finance Logistics bringing that out and growing it into the business is just going to help that onboarding of change and that automation rate across Industries as well by really starting to expose the potential of these products um and grow that for the business and it's not then there's a point of we're bringing in a product that does this thing in a product that does this thing these really can grow and take on anything so brilliant thing our podcast on on sales order processing for now so I appreciate you coming and joining me today I hope for people that have been watching that um give us a bit of insight into some of the other Solutions we have other than just invoice processing and there are lots of other things that we do around other transactional documents under the transactional processes it doesn't have to be a document-centric process for us to get involved and I'm sure we'll cover some more of those in the future and look out for Josh coming back to the podcasters um yeah in the very near future thank you