The Hidden Cost of Manual Order Entry
It looks like a people problem. It’s usually a process problem. A guide for customer service and operations leaders that breaks the cost of manual order entry into time, errors, speed and capacity, with a formula for each and a worked example that adds up to $842,500 a year.
Ask a manufacturer or distributor what manual order entry costs them and you'll probably get a shrug. It isn't a line item on the P&L. Orders and quote requests arrive as PDFs, emails, spreadsheets and handwritten notes, and someone on your team reads each one, looks up the items, keys it into the ERP and checks it. When that work piles up, it looks like a people problem, so you hire another person. But the problem is the process.
This eBook breaks the cost into four parts, with a formula for each, so you can see what it's actually costing your business.
The four hidden costs
- Time: the hours your team spends keying orders and quotes. At 100 orders a day and 30 minutes per order, that's 50 hours of order entry every day.
- Errors: what it costs when an order goes in wrong. A transposed SKU or an old price turns into rework, credits, returns, reshipments and expedited freight that rarely get traced back to order entry.
- Speed: what you lose when orders and quotes wait in a queue. Buyers don't always tell you they went elsewhere because your quote took six hours instead of two.
- Capacity: the people you add as volume grows, and the tribal knowledge that lives in one or two people's heads.
Also inside
- A 15-question self-assessment to check whether manual order entry is costing you more than it appears
- How Global Furniture Group cut hands-on time per order from 31 minutes to 2, without replacing their IBM AS/400 ERP
- How to work out your own number, step by step, or with the Zaqa ROI calculator
- order entry
- cost of manual order entry
- customer service
- operations
- ROI
