Industrial Parts Supplier Realizes $1.8M in Benefits through Order Entry Optimization

Canada’s largest distributor of industrial maintenance, repair, and operational supplies with over 30 locations across Canada.

$1.8M

financial benefits realized

14.5%

reduction in processing time for orders

Challenge

Our client was struggling with quality issues related to order entry, which led to a significant investment in time and cost to resolve disputes. Due to a lack of defined order entry requirements, orders were not being entered correctly by clients. This was leading to a large number of disputed invoices, reducing client satisfaction and leading to high costs for dispute resolution.

Discovery

Our team worked closely with the client to optimize the entry process for top national customers with the goal to reduce the quantity of errors and disputes. The project followed 3 workstreams to address the lack of standardization and resolve order entry errors as follows:

Phase 1: Defined the current customer order entry requirements and subsequent “perfect order template”
Phase 2: Built a centralized database to store order entry requirements
Phase 3: Built and implemented a process and workflow to update existing customer specific order entry requirements to the new practice

Value Created

As result of this initiative, this client enjoyed both immediate and long-term financial and strategic benefits:

$1.84M in benefits through reduction of disputes and increased cashflow
2 FTE (14.5%) reduction through elimination of manual efforts and efficiencies gained by the new speed of operations