No Touch Order Fulfillment — Really?

Ever wish you didn’t have to touch customer orders – that they would just fulfill themselves? Since many chemical companies ship the same products to the same customers via the same mode of transportation many times a year, this is not an unreasonable wish. Such orders are relatively uncomplicated and fulfilling them could be almost automatic, with the right system support.

This vision is exactly what we illustrated this year with our “Digitized Order to Delivery for Chemicals” demo, which is now available in short form as a YouTube video.

With the right integrated SAP solutions, you can enable customer self-service ordering that drives automated delivery and shipment creation, as well as automated transportation planning and tendering, with EHS compliance built into the process. Amazon-like functionality for your customers (OK, well maybe you don’t need Safety Data Sheets for the stuff you order via Amazon, but you get my point) and a huge time saver for all the people in your company who don’t need to touch basic, trouble-free orders.

But what about those times when you can’t fulfill an order? Like when the customer is over their credit limit or when you don’t have the material in stock? Instead of having human eyes on every order just in case there is a problem, best practice is to have an alerting mechanism that notifies your staff ONLY when an order requires human intervention. These alerting mechanisms are designed in to the automated process flow of our demo so you can see how management by exception can streamline your business processes.

Take a look at the video and see how much of it you could implement at your company!