7 Business Benefits of Order-To-Cash Digital Transformation?

To help your organization understand the value you could achieve with through the digital transformation of your order-to-cash process, I’ve highlighted 7 of the key benefits most businesses look to achieve. The 4D Contact team have extensive experience supporting global businesses on their order-to-cash transformation journey. We provide a flexible outsourced receivables management solution which can help support your inhouse team during the transformation period.

Is your current collections process based on excel spreadsheets? Do you struggle to manage your team’s priorities on a weekly, let along daily basis, to ensure optimal cash flow?  Do you suspect more emails are being send than strictly necessary and fewer calls being made, and this is impacting on your collection results, but you just can’t access the data to help your team work more efficiently?

Digital transformation of your order to cash function can provide the transparency, real-time intelligence and data-based insight to deliver truly transformation results. The right solution will provide visibility over legacy processes that have previously been either inaccessible or incredibly complex to find and enable data-based decisions that will drive cost efficiencies and process improvements.

Choose the right solution for your business, execute a well-thought out transformation roadmap and you can deliver some big wins, not only within you credit and collections function, but across all areas of your business.

Outlined below are 7 of the business benefits that should help shape your order-to-cash transformation objectives:

1 / Increase in Working Capital.

The primary business benefit looked for when under-taking the digital transformation within order-to-cash process is collecting cash quicker, reducing DSO and improving working capital. The visibility, real-time data intelligence provided by order-to-cash automation solutions enable a business to make data-based decisions that will improve process efficiency and optimize cash flow.

2 / Greater efficiency (reduced cost-to-serve)

Modern order-to-cash software solutions not only provide a clear view of historically disparate and dense data (and enable data-based decisions), but also enable the automation of repetitive tasks. With emails reminders or SMS texts sent automatically by the system, this can free up your human workforce to focus on high value priority actions and make those much-needed calls to drive payment or deal with disputes.

3 / Enhanced customer experience

The availability of accurate real-time data rather than printed reports ensures that whenever, and whoever, speaks to your customers they can access up-to-date information on their account status. Whether they are checking a payment has been received or are looking to increase a credit limit based on their payment history or credit status you can have all the information to hand to deal with their query efficiently and accurately.

4 / Improved alignment across all business areas

With all business areas able to access to the same real-time data the business can achieve far greater continuity. Sales and marketing can have access to up-to-date information on the status of each customers accounts enabling them to make smarter decisions on key opportunities; whilst improved reporting on when and why invoices are queried, and payments delayed, will help identify where upstream issues are impacting downstream revenue.

5 / Mitigated risk versus opportunity.

For all businesses working on open credit, striking that optimal balance of risk versus opportunity in the credit limits you provide you customers is critical to business growth. Set too stringent limits and your customers will not have the credit facility to build their businesses and trade with you more going forward; set to greater allowance and you increase your risk of bad debt.

Securing visibility over customers payment patterns and behaviours and real-time data on the business’ overall debt position provides senior management with the data required to make strategic decisions to optimize growth.

6 / Increased sales opportunities

The API’s built into many order-to-cash systems facilitate customer on-boarding in seconds rather than days so your customers can be up and trading with you straight away.  This builds your customer base and could potentially provide you with a competitive advantage.

The ease of access to data over your customers’ orders, payments and credit status provides sales with the opportunity to identify and target high profile, low risk customers. Automatic alerts can be set highlighting if an account has a sudden uplift in orders, allowing sales to follow up and ensure the opportunity is maximized. Whilst accesss to real-time credit data means credit limits can be easily adjusted to reflect any changes in credit status, driving sales whilst still always managing risk.

7 / New marketing opportunities

The ability to capture and analyse customer transactional data, enables marketing to develop products and promotions specifically targeted to each individual customer based on data insight.