Sales Order Automation: A Practical Guide

Contents

1. Map your order flows
2. Get master data ready
3. Design the rules
4. Roll out without disrupting customers
5. The numbers to track

Orders arrive as PDFs, spreadsheets and emails. Your team retypes them into the ERP, and mistakes slip through and turn up as wrong deliveries. You probably know automation can fix it. This guide is about how. Need the business case first? Read The hidden cost of every customer order.

1. Map your order flows

Before you change anything, write down how orders arrive today. You’ll find more variety than you expect.

Channel	Typical format
Email attachment	PDF, Excel, Word
Email body	Free text
Customer portal or upload	Spreadsheet or form
EDI	Structured data
Phone or sales rep	Notes, then keyed

Then look at order types: standard orders, call-offs against a blanket order, urgent orders, and amendments to orders already placed. Each may need a different rule.

Where to start: the channel with the most volume and the most keying. For most businesses, that’s PDF and spreadsheet orders arriving by email. To see every step one order passes through, look at The anatomy of an order.

2. Get master data ready

Automated checks are only as good as the data they check against. If your ERP doesn’t know a customer’s delivery address, nothing downstream will either.

Data	What to check
Customer accounts	Duplicates, closed accounts still active, missing account numbers
Delivery addresses	Every regular ship-to address set up, not typed in each time
Product codes	Current, with obsolete codes retired
Customer part numbers	Customers often use their own codes. You’ll need a cross-reference to your product codes, so each order can be mapped without a manual lookup
Price lists and contract prices	Current, with customer-specific prices and promotions recorded
Units of measure	Boxes, packs, each: is a “10” ten boxes or ten units?

This is the least exciting part of the project, and the one that decides how much goes straight through.

3. Design the rules

The goal isn’t to automate every order. It’s to let clean orders through without a person, and send everything else to the right person with the problem already flagged.

Check	Exception if	Send to
Customer	Not recognised, or account on hold	Credit control
Product	Code unknown or discontinued	Customer service
Price	Differs from the contract or price list	Sales operations
Quantity	Far outside the customer’s normal order	Customer service
Delivery address	New, or doesn’t match the account	Customer service
Customer PO number	Already used on an earlier order	Customer service

An order that passes every check becomes a sales order. Start with fewer rules and add more as you see what comes through. A rule that flags half your orders isn’t a control. It’s a queue.

4. Roll out without disrupting customers

Pilot with a handful of high-volume customers, ones whose orders are regular and whose data is clean.
Run in parallel at first. Check the automated sales orders against what your team would have keyed.
Measure against your baseline: time per order, error rate, exceptions per 100 orders.
Expand by customer or channel, not everything at once.
Change the job, not just the tool. Your team moves from keying every order to handling the exceptions. Tell them early, and train them for it.

Customers shouldn’t notice anything, except faster confirmations and fewer mistakes. Check you’re set up for it with the order automation readiness checklist (PDF).

5. The numbers to track

Measure	What it tells you
Straight-through rate	The share of orders that reach the ERP with no one touching them
Time from receipt to sales order	How fast customers get a confirmation
Exceptions per 100 orders, by reason	Where your data or rules need work
Order errors reaching customers	The number that matters most to them
Hours spent keying	Time your team gets back

Don’t know what an order costs you today? Work it out with the Order Cost Calculator. And if your ERP is carrying work it was never built for, read Is your ERP doing too much?.

With Webexpenses Order Management, customer orders are captured as they arrive, SKUs and pricing are checked against your ERP, and the sales order is created for you.