The Hidden Cost of Manual Sales Order Management

One of the biggest challenges that any company faces is the weight of inertia. It’s easy to do the same thing you’ve always done because it 'just works'. 

Unfortunately, processes that once were best in class have started to go by the wayside, especially in  B2B sales order management. 

Still today, B2B order management relies on traditional processes through:

• Email
• Phone
• Fax 

Each relies on manual sales order entry as your buyers are starting to demand digital-first experiences. 

Where Traditional Order Processing Breaks Down

Order entry inefficiencies 

For a customer to place an order via phone, there's a lot of coordination and back-and-forths.  If it’s an email or a faxed order form, they still have to sit at their desk, fill out the form, attach it, and send it to the order desk. 

Put yourself in your buyer's shoes. With traditional sales order management, this means each supplier they trade with can take hours to order from. It's inconvenient for them and laborious for your internal teams. 

With traditional processes, someone needs to take calls via email/phone, check on inventory levels, send a purchase order acknowledgement, and then update in back-end (ERP/accounting systems). It's a lot of unnecessary steps. 

Traditional order management doesn’t scale

Manual processes might work when you’re handling 50 orders a day. But what happens when you grow to 200?

• You hire more people just to keep up with data entry.

• Onboarding new staff takes weeks.

• Senior employees and managers get pulled into firefighting instead of focusing on strategy.

•  

Scaling should increase your profit margins. With manual sales order management, it often just increases your payroll and error rates.

Complexity Grows With Every Sales Channel

As your company expands, you don’t just add more orders, you add more rules and more logic to yoru workflows.

• New retailers demand EDI compliance.

• Distributors send orders through different portals.

• Reps track pricing in spreadsheets that go out of date instantly.

This is the reality of scaling on manual sales order processing: more sales = more complexity = more cost.

Why Automation Is the Only Way Forward

The solution isn’t to work harder. It’s to work smarter with automation.

It removed the silos between departments by integrating orders and shipping directly to your ERP or accounting system.

If your employees don’t have to swivel their chairs between portals and spend their time keying sales order data, they can spend their time on customer service and strategic initiatives. 

Automation your sales orders delivers four game-changing benefits:

1. Reduced labor costs

With automated order entry systems, you no longer need to bring in new employees as you scale. Automation means that your existing team can process more orders with fewer resources.

It removes the negative feedback loop of your employees being burnt out by order volumes they can’t manage — and negates the chance of your senior management having to step in and fill orders themselves.

2. Simplified order management

With a system that translates and triages orders, the complexity of scaling is significantly reduced.

With automation, there's no more swivel chairing, no more manual updates for shipping, and no more worrying about whether the information lines up with your back-end systems.

3. Faster sales cycles

 With automation, every single price across all of your sales sheets is instantly updated, providing your team and customers with up-to-date information. 

How OrderEase Helps You Break Free From Manual Order Management

OrderEase is purpose-built to help suppliers modernize their order operations. Instead of forcing your team to juggle phone orders, emails, and portals, we unify everything into a single workflow that connects directly to your ERP or accounting system.

With OrderEase, you can:

• Digitize customer ordering with branded portals tied to your catalog and pricing.

• Automate EDI so retailer requirements feel as simple as any other order.

• Standardize sales channels into one format that flows straight into your ERP.

• Empower sales reps with mobile tools, barcode scanning, and offline mode.

The result? Faster orders, fewer errors, and a business that can scale without adding unnecessary headcount or cost.

If you want to know more about how you can take your order management practices to the next level, reach out to us today for a demo.