ERP Business Systems and Inter-Departmental Communications

Telesales takes an order and the customer specifies that they wish the ordered items to be packed and delivered in a special one-off manner. The customer is important to your business, so you decide to accept the conditions and make a small charge.

Now the problem begins - How does the telesales person communicate these instructions to the warehouse manager and delivery manager in a timely and consistent manner?

What happens when accommodating such customer requests forms or becomes a distinguishing factor of your business, to the extent that they form a substantial part of your business.

The use of inter-departmental e-mail is one way to solve this communication problem. But its major disadvantage is that the instructions are not held in or connected with the original sales order in the business system. And when the number of orders requiring special treatment grows to a level beyond a few, the chances of these special instructions being missed when an individual order is picked/packed/despatched is increased. To a level that is an embarrassment to the company when things go wrong.

The only effective alternative is have an ERP Business System that provides for telesales to record such instructions in records relating to the sales order and to have such records available to and changeable by, any other department. Only in this way are the notes directly linked with the sales order and thereby visible at all times to every department that needs to see them. What is more the use of an external system is eliminated making the secure backup of such notes part of the normal backup routine of the main ERP Business System.

One major advantage of a ‘General Notes’ facility as described above, is that it can be used for lots of other inter-departmental communications, like - telesales to credit control/accounts; sales to purchasing department.

A business system that provides for General Notes to be held for each of the primary business transaction documents (Sales Orders, Purchase Orders, Time Recordings, Job Costings, Production Orders, etc.) will be much more flexible, responsive and useable than a system that does not provide such facility.

See Acceptum Business Software on RCL Systems web site.

Transport/Delivery Restrictions and ERP Business Software

In to-days world of delivery lorry/van restrictions, that can be on - access times, vehicle weight/size, congestion charge zones, etc. How does a supplier organisation keep up to date, or even retain the necessary data on these restrictions, as imposed on individual customer delivery points?

The majority of older ERP/business systems struggle to hold such data in a manner or format convenient to the supplier and able to be seen and set by multiple departments that need or have access to such data.

A good ERP/business system will provide for this data to be held, accessible and changeable by each of the departments involved in the delivery process.

Part of the sales forces task in to-days environment should be to collect and enter the initial assessment of such restrictions into the business system when taking an order. Either, at an individual sales order level, or better still at the customer delivery point level. Then later on in the Sales Order completion process, the warehouse/delivery department can use this information to pack the product in such a manner as to meet weight/size restrictions and schedule a delivery time within the allowable time window.
This data should also be available for update by the Transport/Delivery department when a driver reports back that the data needs to be changed for some reason.

The complexity of this delivery restriction data at its simplest level need only be a text memo attribute held at the sales order or delivery address level. For other organisation more complex data structures may be required holding such details as lorry size, maximum cargo weight and size dimensions, etc.

If delivery forms a problem for an organisation at the moment then this problem will only grow in the years to come as more restrictions and congestion charge zones are imposed, making it all the more important that such data is held in the main business system.