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.
Capture all information in one place
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
SKU Matrix
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
Accept ATP
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.
Accept Shortage
The customer service representative can select this option if the order has to be accepted despite the shortage. The representative may select this option if the business can fulfill shortages by moving items between warehouses or through other means.
Inbuilt credit card authorization
The Fortude Customer Order Manager also provides the ability to process credit card authorizations within the interface. To do this in standard M3, users have to switch to a different program and reenter customer information.
Manage additional charges
In addition to the standard charges in M3/CloudSuite, the Fortude Customer Order Manager allows setting up predefined or calculated charges based on custom rules.
For example, based on the order quantity, a business can configure a Small Order Charge. If changes are made to the order quantity, the Customer Order Manager recalculates the Small Order Charge.
A summary of all header charges can be viewed under the Header Charges tab.
Figure 4: Summary of charges
Capture additional information with text notes
Using the Text tab, customer service representatives can provide additional information or instructions. In the following example (Figure 5), the Customer Order Manager has been configured to provide information for internal and external users and warehouse personnel.
Figure 5: Text note fields in the Customer Order Manager
Built-in data validations and permission controls
Fortude Customer Order Manager can validate data at the entry level based on custom business logic before posting them to M3. Organizations can use permission controls to authorize only a selected group of users to update specific fields.
If you receive order information through a call center, Fortude Customer Order Manager is ideal for your business as they can significantly improve the productivity and the user experience of your customer service representatives. In addition, by improving accuracy and speed, Fortude Customer Order Manager can help you build better relationships with your customers, who play a key role in your business’s success.
Written by:
Lahiru Senadheera
Consultant, Fortude
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