Boost Infor CloudSuite’s order capturing efficiency with Fortude Customer Order Manager

From placing a customer order to delivering goods, having robust COM processes ensure a strong bottom line, positive impact to the cash flow, and increased customer satisfaction. Customer order placement—the head of the COM process—is a critical step. At this point, the customer service representatives should have the visibility to information such as inventory availability and the agility to complete order placements fast. Inability to ensure information accuracy at this level can cause issues when allocating, picking, and shipping goods.

This blog post explains the means through which Fortude Customer Order Manager can streamline the customer order management in your Infor M3 or CloudSuite ERP solutions.

Fortude Customer Order Manager provides a unified interface for business users to capture order information required to initiate the order. In standard M3, to capture order information, users have to go through multiple panels and switch between multiple programs. Fortude Customer Order Manager irons out this inefficiency by providing a single interface to capture order information. This allows business users to complete the data entering process fast. Also, the ability to see all information in one place increases efficiency and reduces margin for error.

Figure 1: Fortude Customer Order Manager interface

Customers do not purchase products; they purchase stock-keeping units (SKUs). An SKU represents a combination of different product properties, such as color and size. The Fortude Customer Order Manager provides an SKU Matrix interface, which allows customer service representatives to enter quantities on a grid. Each cell in the grid represents an SKU.

The SKU Matrix increases visibility and helps customer service representatives to feed SKU quantities fast.

Figure 2: SKU Matrix

In addition, the SKU Matrix indicates On-hand, Allocatable, and Available-to-promise (ATP) quantities below the grid, for each SKU. Having these information at hand allows customer service representatives to make quick decisions.

Before confirming the SKU quantities, Fortude solution validates SKU quantities based on On-hand, Allocatable, and Available-to-promise (ATP) quantities, and displays a popup, allowing users to Accept ATP or Accept Shortage.

Figure 3: SKU quantity validation popup

The customer service representative can select this option if the customer agrees to proceed with the ATP stock.

Based on the capacity of the manufacturer or the supplier, and the required shipment date, the popup displays the ATP schedule for each SKU that does not have on-hand stock.