Improve your sales order flow for building services

How to create outlook signature

hi I'm James this is whiteboard Wednesday I want you to know that I'm a Gemini and we need love too let's talk about order management so something that every manufacturer every warehouse and every combination in between has to go through very basic how your customers get their orders fulfilled by you but if we can make this process efficient no matter how basic it is we're going to see a big return on how much time we have and I think also our revenues so look at how it should function and that is we got our customer hopefully they love us they get their order in to us and hopefully it's a whole bunch we immediately turn around and schedule that order make sure that we have the proper inventory are good to send off to them get it shipped out we're going to close that order on our end send them that invoice and with that sweet sweet payday maybe take the wife out to dinner but when we get that order and then from there on out how we schedule it and ship it there's a lot of delays that can happen on our end and the more delays the more hassles the more errors the more problems the more cuts we're going to get into our own revenue so how can we fix that well let's look at kind of how the paper system works we talked about it a lot and if you use a paper system or any kind of filing system like it it's not a knock on your process it's hopefully just to cast little light on how you can be saving some more time so you probably have all the files all the paperwork all your spreadsheets of keeping track of the orders the closed orders what was scheduled what was sent the dates all the stuff you need to keep your taxes later on how that tied into your financial statements all that information has to be stored and managed and hopefully is accessible in case you need it maybe a customer is not happy maybe you're looking for trends within your own business or industry it's a lot of work it's a lot of places of human touch possibility for human error and it just wastes a lot of time really inefficient especially in this day and age but if we compare that to a more automated system a more updated system where we have our computer and our software system and a barcode scanner when that order comes in it's immediately logged from where for how much we can always get access to it we know how much inventory we have on hand because that's already in our file we know when to schedule it we can automatically link it to a shipping carrier so they know when to come pick it up and then we can send an email to our customer to let them know it's out the door here's when you can expect to get it your opening of that communication with the customer which usually leads to repeat orders but you're also able to log when you close that order when you sent the invoice and all that information is kept in a nice central hub and with a barcode scanner you scan it once and it's done inventory coming in scanned inventory going out scan all that information going again to the same system so you're not having to refile you're not having to search really really making that process efficient how it should be you're kind of closing the loop faster and then at the end of the day you take all this information and you join it with either QuickBooks or your zero count whatever financial package you're using so that it's all there you're not reinsuring all this information that you have back into the system doing double and triple work it's just a waste of time time that you could be spending on increasing this process sending out more orders being more efficient which then in turn helps with your customers and their satisfaction with you their confidence in your ability to fulfill what they're looking for so again it's very basic common sense but it really can make a difference in between keeping your company fast and competitive or kind of stuck and slow so maybe consider an automated solution something that will speed up your process speed up your company and hopefully send a boost to your revenues I'm James this is whiteboard Wednesday still a Gemini see it you you