As your organisation develops and expands, so does the need to respond quickly and efficiently to higher volumes of calls for your product.
When that all-important customer order comes through the door, whether that’s via email or EDI (electronic data interchange), from your website, or even just over the phone, you need to be sure that you have the resources at your disposal so that you can fulfil the order.
There are a number of strands that feed into this and in this article, we’ll take a look at how, by using Sage X3, you’ll be able to:
- Get your orders on – fast!
- Offer your customers complementary or alternative products as part of their order
- Identify precisely what stock you’ve got and where it is
- Give your customer a great experience through an efficient despatch process
Get Your Orders On – Fast!
Starting with the manual option, entering orders into Sage X3 from scratch is quick and easy, with order screens configured to your own specific requirements, lots of ways of looking up customer details and easy item selection.
Alternatively, you can create imports, EDI documents and/or use APIs to communicate with a website.
Buying again? For repeat customers, you can either copy whole previous orders, or cherry pick previously ordered items to save you time.
Complementary or Alternative Products
When you’re processing your customer’s order, you have a number of tools at your disposal for generating some additional margin. Whether that’s, as we’ve mentioned above, reordering a product that they’ve bought before, building up a kit of complementary items (“Wireless mouse with that keyboard, sir?”), or, using a Mysoft Plugin, offering cross-sell and up-sell opportunities. You can also view current stock levels and offer alternatives if a particular item is currently out of stock.
What Stock You Have and Where It Is
In a previous article, we talked about how you can use Location Management in Sage X3 to define specific locations for all of your warehouse stock. Well, once you’ve got that organised, a number of enquiries allow you to view your products in real time. There are several prompts around the system such as while you’re raising orders, allocating stock for picking and delivery, and also when you’re reordering, for instance, that will provide you with snapshots of:
- How much stock you have,
- What condition it’s in,
- When its best before date might be,
- And, of course, where it is.
Your organisation has invested quite heavily in stock, so it makes sense to make the best use of it and minimise wastage. Sage X3 can help you to ensure that you’re using use the oldest stock, or perhaps the stock with the closest Best Before date, first. Allocation rules allow you to define how stock is going to be automatically assigned to orders, so that you can direct your pickers to the earliest dated products, or the items with the oldest batch or serial numbers, at the right time.
A Great Experience Through an Efficient Despatch Process
So, the customer has ordered and you have (or are getting) stock to cover the order. Now all you have to do is despatch it.
In Sage X3, Preparation Plans allow you to book in your picking slots in advance based on anticipated delivery dates. You could arrange things an order at a time, or by product, or by vehicle. Then you are picking the order lines, scanning barcodes as you go until the pick is complete before creating your Delivery Notes (automatically perhaps) for everything due to go out on any given day.
Another Mysoft Plugin allows you to book the delivery directly with your chosen carrier for the customer and then print out the carrier’s label to place on the package. The carrier knows where and when to deliver; when the customer’s site is closed for deliveries, for instance; and whether there are any special instructions.
If you’re organising your own deliveries then X3 can help you to optimise your delivery routes and, if the customer is overseas, print your supporting documents in the customer’s domestic language. There are all kinds of documentation that you can print from X3 to support the export process, like commercial invoices and forms specific to your own particular industry, which might be triggered by an order or delivery.
Your Essential Next Step
The Sales process is one of the most critical operational areas to get right and it’s important to remind ourselves that, in this context, no two organisations are the same. So there clearly shouldn’t necessarily be a “one size fits all” approach to systematisation.
Sage X3 provides complete flexibility in terms of how you configure the core system. But at Mysoft, as well as being able to fine-tune Sage X3’s standard functionality better than most, we also appreciate that there might be a particular best of breed solution out there that gives you precisely what you need, just the way you like it. Either way, we have a wealth of experience in optimising solutions and enabling customers to derive even greater benefits from their investment in X3, whether that’s through development of new functionality or through seamless integrations with external solutions.
Contact us today to find out more about how Sage X3 and Mysoft can help you to a more efficient sales process.
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