Smart Automation Transforms Order Management Operations, Improves Customer Experience

This is our story of co-creating an order management solution with a leading CPG company

As we know ...

The supply chains of Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) companies are often volatile. Poor order management operations add to the complexity of this problem. There is significant revenue loss when the right order is not at the right time and place. Apart from impacting customer experience, such gaps also lead to increased operating costs.

The challenge for a CPG company was...

Its existing order management process was not equipped to support the requirements of its expanding customer base. The company risked losing premium customers because of its inability to deliver orders On Time in Full (OTIF). There were other complexities adding to the problem. On the one hand, the production of perishable products had to be on time, every time, to enable longer shelf-life. On the other, the company lacked operational visibility due to fragmented operations spread across multiple plants and channels such as e-mail, calls and fax. Each plant had its own way of receiving and dispatching orders. In addition, manual processes and lack of smart checks were leading to increased errors in orders, invoice queries and disputes.

Here’s what we co-created as a solution…

WNS leveraged its extensive experience in the CPG industry and in-depth expertise in order management to set up an Order-to-Cash (O2C) Center of Excellence (CoE). The CoE helped address the CPG company’s key challenges and transformed its order management operations through:

• Process mapping and re-engineering

  • Building process inventory for order management to capture order flow and operational nuances

  • Standardizing operating procedures, controls and visibility using quality frameworks

  • Implementing Electronic Data Interface (EDI) as an order channel

  • Deploying smart automation to reduce manual interventions, identify and minimize duplicate payments, automate the dispatch of order invoices and enable smooth payroll reconciliation across distribution sites

• Setting up quality control

  • Building a quality check team to validate orders across the value chain. This team complemented the existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system and helped plug the gaps to reduce errors

• Focused order management team

  • Establishing a specialized order management team to work with premium customers throughout their journey, and ensure higher satisfaction as well as improve order fulfillment rate and on-time delivery

• Delivering actionable insights

  • Enabling business intelligence reporting across phone, e-mail, fax and EDI channels to provide insights into customer satisfaction, OTIF and dispute resolution

The outcomes from the process of co-creation are…

The O2C CoE enabled the CPG company to glean actionable insights and gain operational visibility to drive process improvement and overall customer satisfaction. Key benefits include:

• Achieving more than 99 percent compliance in e-mail orders

• Achieving more than 99 percent customer satisfaction in the premium segment; overall customer satisfaction across categories stood at ~95 percent

• ~80 percent of calls from customers were answered within 20 seconds with less than 1 percent abandonment rate

• Deploying smart automation to reduce manual interventions, identify and minimize duplicate payments, automate the dispatch of order invoices and enable smooth payroll reconciliation across distribution sites

• 18-day, post go-live improvement in Days Sales Outstanding (DSO)

• ~50 percent reduction in manual efforts due to smart automation and EDI implementation