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Whiteland, IN 46184
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Operations are awash with back end processes, invoicing, receiving, accounts payable, inventory management, accounting, workflow, and work order management. When small and when line items are few, this can be done easily.
Let’s look at how automating orders (filling an order queue manually or via a sales portal ) is affected by the underlying process
Think of a small restaurant during lunch, receipts can be quickly added together, orders can be taken manually and the kitchen can fill such orders. With a large restaurant at peak period, manually taking orders gives a risk of delays or orders being forgotten (very possible) in which case you have clients reminding the servers of their orders.
Any order fulfillment has this risk as it scales up, orders not fulfilled in a timely fashion if taken manually.
I once ordered some machines from a specialty machine shop in Alpharetta, Georgia. They have personable customer service but really poor order management, even though it is supposedly automated.
It took two weeks to have delivery of an off the shelf item.
Just automating is not enough, the manual process must change to take advantage of automation, taking orders online and not having push automation directly to order fulfillment is no different from having people calling to order.
Technology by itself solves nothing, the real value comes by the change in the process due to automation.