Implementing Sales Order Automation

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If your organization provides goods or services, your sales order process is a completely necessary part of your day-to-day activity. Unfortunately, this process can often be a time-consuming drain on employee productivity. Most organizations just see this as a necessary evil that won’t ever change, but by strategically implementing smarter processes, your organization can completely transform what was once a frustrating process.

We’ll be sharing more on what Sales Order Automation looks like, and how DocStar and Mosaic can help implement it for your organization.  

 

What is Sales Order Automation (and why it’s important) 

Sales order automation (SOA) specifically focuses on streamlining time-consuming manual pieces in the sales process. By automating these necessary tasks, your sales team can focus on value-adding activities rather than spending excess time on data entry. 

A common concern in any organization is whether or not crucial tasks get completed. Specifically, in the sales process, employees may enter incorrect data or neglect to enter it completely. This can lead to inaccurate billing, missing sales, and a loss in time in productivity. Automation ensures the correct data is entered and that it follows the correct steps in the process. It helps simplify the sales cycle, empowering customers and prospects to complete purchases and better understand your organization’s products or services. 

The Sales Order process has evolved greatly since the days of filling out carbon sales order forms and manually entering it into a register. Mosaic’s partner, DocStar, has led this evolution by providing advanced automation technology that allows for a streamlined sales process with little to no human intervention.

By taking advantage of this technology, you can improve your customer relationships, streamline employee tasks, and gain a competitive advantage. It may seem like SOA is a massive leap from where your business is currently, but with the right tools and knowledge, your organization can quickly evolve. 

 

DocStar’s Sales Order Automation functionality

An automated Sales Order process starts in one of two ways, either a scanned purchase order or a digital document. By accepting both formats, your organization can best support your customer’s existing way of submitting orders, reducing any potential learning curves or friction. 

Once the order is received, it goes through Intelligent Data Capture (IDC). IDC automatically captures and extracts structured data (such as a customer’s past purchases) as well as unstructured data (like written communications). Once IDC recognizes and indexes the order, it can be passed along to the next step. This step eliminates the traditional step of receiving the sales order and then manually entering the data into your ERP. 

The order is then automatically received by your ERP, which will then validate the data from the order. Key pieces such as customer name or number, part numbers, and other information are reviewed. If there is an exception or data that requires manual review, it will automatically be sent to the correct employee to validate it manually. If the data is valid, it will create a sales order in your ERP and the purchase is one step closer to being complete. 

This entire process can happen with next to no human intervention, except for scanning in an order at the beginning and data validation at the end. Because this process is hands-off, your employees can be more productive, leading to more sales and more growth. 

 

Next Steps

If the concept of completely transforming your Sales Order process sounds overwhelming, don’t worry, Mosaic is here to help you through the entire process.

Give us a call at 800.387.7859 to discuss your current Sales Order process and where you want to go.

6 Ways Your Organization Can Use Web Forms

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What forms does your organization utilize? Once you begin to take inventory of all of the forms you rely on to complete common tasks, you may be surprised at how many you use.

How do you and your employees complete these forms? Often they’re completed on paper, making them prone to errors, missing information, and being misplaced. Fillable PDF forms eliminate the paper aspect of the process, but they’re often difficult to complete and don’t save any time compared to paper.

Implementing a smart web forms product can eliminate these issues and create a simpler, more streamlined process for you and your employees. Organizations often don’t realize the full potential of a web forms product and worry that it’s limited to just one specific process or department. The benefit of web forms is that they’re flexible and scalable, meaning they can fit in with just about any process or need, and thanks to Mosaic’s implementation consultants, they can be customized to your organization.

So, exactly where can these forms be used? We’ll review 6 common uses, but the beauty of web forms is that any paper form can be transformed into a web form.

Onboarding Paperwork

The time from when a new hire signs their offer letter to their first week is crucial for an organization to make a good impression on their new employee. Forms such as I-9, W-4, WOTC, 401K, Direct Deposit, and Benefits Elections can easily turn in to stacks of paperwork. These forms also require new hires to write out the same basic information over and over again.

Online forms simplify the process and eliminate redundancy. Each form gets filled out quicker and there is less margin for error. Also, employees simply e-sign their documents, meaning no printing, signing, and scanning necessary.

Timesheets/Time Off Requests

Processing and managing timesheets and time-off requests is a heavy lift for human resources. It’s not uncommon for paper timesheets and time-off requests to go missing or for data to be entered incorrectly. Web forms allow for your employees to quickly fill out their timesheets as well as submit time off requests to their managers for approval.

Contracts

If your organization requires employees, vendors, or clients to sign any sort of contract, you understand the frustration that comes with trying to get a signature. This becomes increasingly difficult if you are sending contracts outside your physical office. Using web forms makes it simple to send contracts to the right people to review, and with wet signatures, they can sign them from their computer, tablet, or even mobile device, no printing and scanning required.

Expense Reports

When your employees submit expense reports, they typically have two choices, scan their invoices and receipts and email them in bulk to accounting, or staple together the physical documents and drop them off in person. Both processes aren’t organized, and there’s a high likelihood for documents to get lost or entered incorrectly. Web forms can eliminate the disorganization of paper expense reporting and can help track employee submissions.

Purchase Orders/Proof of Delivery

If you operate in the manufacturing or distribution space, you likely have countless orders placed weekly. Typically the existing process requires new documents for each step, the purchase order, the picking ticket, verification documents, delivery slip, proof of delivery, and other documentation. Web forms can not only make the order process easier for customers, but it can also help move along your workflow and reduce the number of physical documents attached to each order. Proof of delivery tickets are digital and able to be updated instantly with wet signature verification.

Healthcare

Many nonprofits and healthcare organizations have antiquated patient onboarding processes. Stacks of paper forms are required for patients or caretakers to complete and for your organization to track. Additionally, crucial patient records are left disorganized, which can not only be a point of frustration for your employees, but it can also lead to legal issues.  Web forms can solve that. A custom patient onboarding workflow connects directly to your ECM. Meaning you can quickly onboard patients and easily track them.

 

These are just a small sample of the uses for web forms for your organization. At Mosaic, we can help you determine the perfect use for forms in your organization. Think your organization would benefit from migrating from paper-based forms to web forms but aren’t sure how? Give us a call at 770.452.7373 and we’ll see how your current business processes can benefit.

Comparing DocStar to Free Storage Services

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When organizations are considering migrating to a paperless office they often ask, “why is a paid ECM solution better than the free ones I see online?” It’s a valid question, after all, there are plenty of free file sharing and storing solutions available with enticing features (and of course, an enticing price tag).

In order to understand why free storage solutions may not be an effective content management strategy for your organization, it’s important to understand the differences between free storage and ECM.

But it’s not a viable long-term solution for your organization, and what you may save in upfront costs you may wind up losing down the road in operating expenses, often without even realizing it. So, why should your organization utilize a robust ECM solution vs. a free storage one?

You get what you pay for

DropBox, Google Drive, Box, and a wealth of other storage solutions draw you in with their “free” price tag and seemingly limitless possibilities. These cloud-based solutions are excellent for storing simple text-based documents and collaborating and sharing. Unfortunately, you have a limit to how much you can store, and with little sorting and organization beyond basic filing, keeping track of multiple documents can get overwhelming.

You may not be able to organize and track the information from these documents in the way your organization requires. If you’re utilizing a free service to manage your AP/AR documentation, you won’t be able to search the document content itself for specific information such as date, purchase order number, or vendor attached to it. So while yes, this solution will eliminate paper from your PO workflow, it won’t alleviate any of the frustration associated with managing hundreds, if not thousands, unique files.

All of these solutions require you to store your documents in their cloud, which could be a security concern for organizations that need to keep everything on-premise or in a more secure cloud environment. These solutions offer little security for sharing these files as well, so when sharing confidential information you may put your organization at risk.

At the end of the day, these online storage solutions offer just that, storage. While many organizations certainly benefit from these products and features for certain documents, it’s often not the best solution for sensitive financial, employee, or other important business documents.

Why ECM is different

Where these solutions fall short, DocStar thrives. ECM provides more than simply a digital filing cabinet, it provides a more efficient workflow for your documents. Features such as Smart OCR capture can pull information from your scanned and uploaded documents, allowing you to search by the document’s content vs. just its name. This means you can quickly find the exact document you need just by searching for a specific field.

A smarter ECM solution means you can store your records on your terms, either on-premise at your location or in a secure cloud environment. Having options means that you can determine what would work best for your organization’s needs rather than simply be forced one way or another based on what the servicer requires.

While an ECM solution may require upfront and maintenance costs, you’ll quickly find yourself saving more than you spent. With proper implementation and maintenance, your organization will save money, time, and work.

The next step

Once you fully understand the scope of your organization’s needs, having a conversation with our team of experts to understand further how DocStar ECM can help your organization across all departments.

Give us a call at 770.452.7373 to learn more.