Despite all the time and money that’s been poured into business process reengineering initiatives and technolo-gies like EDI, far too many customer transactions still involve avoidable human interventions at multiple points during the order-to-cash process.

These repetitive, unnecessary manual workarounds are increasing costs, incurring delays, introducing errors, making it hard for suppliers to achieve perfect orders, and holding organisations back in their quest for transactional excellence.

These gaps exist because customers choose to communicate with vendors in a wide range of different formats that do not lend themselves to traditional standards-based automation. These issues can only be addressed by systems that recognise that this diversity is inevitable and must be accommodated.

1. OmPrompt. Introducing customer automation management.

Accommodating customer- and market- specific behavioursIn stark contrast to conventional approaches, customer automation management enables suppliers to systematically deal with predictable customer- and market-specific behaviours and to eliminate the most common causes of unnecessary manual interventions and workarounds.

OmPrompt’s solutions are enabling some of the world’s leading brands – including British Sugar, CEVA, Danone, DSV, Heinz, Kellogg’s, Kimberly-Clark, Medtronic, Stryker, Reckitt Benckiser and Unilever – to systematically reduce costs, avoid delays, eliminate errors, process perfect orders and achieve transactional excellence.

Transactional excellence throughout the order-to-cash processThe business benefits of customer automation management span the entire Order-to-Cash process, from order automation through delivery visibility, proof-of-delivery, claims management and invoice and payment automation.

Perhaps best of all, because OmPrompt’s Customer Automation Management solutions are delivered as a service, they do not require a large upfront investment, can be deployed rapidly, deliver results quickly and can be continuously adapted to meet changing market conditions.

Introducing customer automation management

There are easier ways to bridge gaps in business processes.

2. OmPrompt. Introducing customer automation management.

Are your customer service teams spending too much of their time manually keying in data, correcting errors or checking order details against your ERP system before customer orders can be processed? OmPrompt’s Order Automation solutions can help refocus your resources from the back office to the front line.

Are delivery visibility challenges making it hard for you to see what’s really happening to your customer shipments? Does your team find themselves having to manually chase the status of open orders? OmPrompt’s Delivery Visibility and Proof of Delivery solutions can help you manage the situation proactively.

Do you recognise any of these challenges?Releasing your resources.

Seeing what’s really going on.

Does your customer service team struggle to reconcile logistics or pricing claims from your customers for lack of accurate timely information? Are you having to agree otherwise avoidable write-offs as a result? OmPrompt’s Claims Management solutions can help you bring the situation under control.

These are just a handful of the more common examples of the application of customer automation management to the order-to-cash process. We have many more that we would be delighted to share with you.

Eliminating avoidable claims.

These repetitive, unnecessary manual workarounds are increasing costs, incurring delays, introducing errors, and preventing organisations from achieving transactional excellence.

Adaptive multi-format supportFirst, customer automation management solutions must be capable of accommodating a wide range of data formats without the need for any changes on the customer side, or the need for repetitive manual intervention on the supplier side. We refer to this capability as adaptive multi-format support. Whatever form or format the order comes in – fax, email, EDI, and so on – the system must be capable of transforming the data where necessary and process it.

3. OmPrompt. Introducing customer automation management.

Intelligent business rulesNext, customer automation manage-ment solutions must be capable of capturing and implementing business rules that are sometimes complex and often unique to a specific customer situation – and it should be possible to add to or amend these rules without the need for any IT-related interventions or delays. We refer to this capability as intelligent business rules. For example, if customer orders are tax-exempt, or if special handling or shipping is required, the system must be capable of automatically recognising this and taking the appropriate action.

Customer master data validationThird, customer automation manage-ment solutions must be able to validate the customer master data stored in the ERP system against order, claim, or POD data. We refer to this capability as customer master data validation. For example, when an order is received that references an obsolete or out of date product name or part number customer automation management will replace it with the correct name or number.

Accelerated exception managementFinally, customer automation management solutions must be able to recognise one-off-exceptions to normal business situations and escalate them for priority attention in a manage-by-exception environment. We refer to this capability as accelerated exception management. Whenever a unique or time-critical situation that cannot be automated arises, the system must be able to recognise this and provide alerts and automatically escalate issues so they can be dealt with before they become problems.

The four pillars of customer automation managementUnlike EDI and other related technologies, customer automation management does not rely on the customer investing in expensive or complicated technologies, being forced to embrace standards or adopting processes that are alien to their natural buying behaviours.Instead, this new generation of solutions are delivered as a service and designed to help suppliers adapt to a wide range of diverse customer interactions, and to dramatically reduce the levels of manual processing that would otherwise be required to accommodate them.

This new generation of customer automation management solutions rests on four key functional pillars.

About OmPromptAs the pioneer of customer automation management, OmPrompt is helping a growing number of the world’s leading brands to eliminate gaps in their order-to-cash processes that have previously required manual workarounds.

OmPrompt’s innovative approach to automating repetitive work in the customer management cycle is enabling clients to free up resources, manage by exception, remove restric-tions and eliminate risks to their business.

Based in Oxfordshire UK, OmPrompt processes transactions for global brands in 35 countries on five continents.

Learn moreTo learn more about how customer automation management could help your organisation achieve transactional excellence, download our latest white paper or contact us here.

OmPrompt Ltd67 Innovation DriveMilton ParkAbingdonOxfordshireOX14 4RQUK

+44 (0)1235 436000

www.omprompt.cominfo@omprompt.com

Join the Customer Automation Management Group

Many organisations have already achieved dramatic efficiency improve-ments in their procure-to-pay cycles by driving their suppliers to adopt standardised processes and technol-ogy solutions such as eInvoicing. At first glance, we may think that the same gains can be achieved by implementing a similarly standardised approach to the processes within the order-to-cash cycle.

But here’s the challenge: the standard-ised, simplifying mind-set that has worked so effectively in increasing procure-to-pay efficiencies will struggle to cope with the diverse range of customer message formats and business processes that are inevitable in any complex business environment.In fact, insisting on a rigid, stan-dardised approach to processing orders runs a real risk of alienating the customers your sales force has worked so hard to acquire. In most competitive

Introduction

3. OmPrompt. Using arrows to make stars of your customer facing team.

business environments, suppliers have to find ways of accommodating the many diverse ways with which their customers choose to place orders.This is why, in most markets, EDI has only succeeded in automating part of the order processing workload – the generally accepted figures lie somewhere between 30–70%. The remaining orders are received in a variety of formats that typically involve some form of manual intervention at one or more stages in the order-to-cash cycle.

This diversity is not just restricted to order formats: increasingly, customers have specific requirements and expectations in other areas. They may, for example, want consignment stock, vendor-managed inventory or call-off orders managed and reported on in a certain way. Or they may expect any returns to be managed according to their own defined process.

Accommodating these customer- specific process requirements can become a condition of doing business with their organisation – and assuming that we do not wish to turn their business away, we need to find ways of dealing with the customer’s expecta-tions. All-too-often, this creates yet another set of customer-specific workarounds.

Trying to impose standards on their operational diversity can easily alienate your hard-won customers.

Customer contact resources that should be focused on delivering a superior customer experience are being repeatedly redirected to bridging the gaps in back office processes.

Is it really possible to deliver

superior customer service and

transactional excellence at

the same time?

OmPrompt Executive Briefing

Using arrows to

make stars of

your customer

facing teams.

Delivering transactional excellence with OmPrompt customer automation management

Customer Submits in any format

ERP system

Any customer transaction type■ Order■ Order Amendment■ Price File■ Order Confirmation■ Shipping Notification■ Proof of Delivery■ Goods Receipt Note■ Discrepancy■ Return■ Claim■ Invoice■ Credit/Debit note■ Remittance Advice

OmPrompt managed serviceAdaptive multi-format support

Intelligent business rules

Masterdata validation

Accelerated exception management

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