The Problem:
Businesses can't accurately and efficiently keep track of their incoming orders.
Time and money is wasted on a process that can be automated.
Cash Flow:
It's clear from your demand analysis that peak season is just around the corner.
Customers will be swarming in all at once wanting to buy all your stock. Business will be booming; sales will be high.
But you don’t know exactly when your shipments are going to arrive from your suppliers. You may have a rough idea, but you don’t know for sure if they will arrive in time to satisfy all this demand. What do you do?
You panic buy.
You over order to make sure there’s no chance of losing any sales. A big pile of shipments come in all at once. But you still put your feet up and take a big sigh of relief because your job is secure and know McDonalds has enough meat patties to last an eternity of customer demand.
Except now you have no cash and a full warehouse and you’re praying that peak seasons does in fact reach its peak.
You also have increased labour costs as you had to hire more staff to be able to unpack a high influx of shipments coming in all at once.
Cash Flow - How Orderlink Solves Your Problem:
Visible and accurate shipment ETAs you know you can trust.
All order milestones from PO creation to shipment arrival and invoice payment you know exactly where your goods are at any time.
If your goods are still in the supplier’s factory or on the water that information is right at your fingertips.
With information you can trust now you can be confident in planning shipments to arrive just in time rather that all at once.
Not only does this mean less strain on cash flow but your total purchases reduce as you realise you didn’t have to hold inventory at such high buffers after all.
Since shipments are stagnated there is no need to hire that additional labour staff. You also consistently free up space in your warehouse that then allows you to store any other additional goods.
Multiple platforms:
I’m guessing this is your process at the moment (in its simplest form) ...
You create your PO in your company’s ERP system.
You download that PO document from your ERP into a PDF.
You attach that PDF to an email and send that to a supplier via email and keep a copy of that PDF somewhere in your company’s shared folder drive.
There is a back-and-forth email communication between you and your supplier until the goods finally get into the hands of your freight forwarder.
Your freight forwarder supplies you with the shipping details and you manually punch that information in to one of your many supplier spreadsheets.
From then on if you want to track your shipment while its on the water you can logon to your freight forwarders subpar shipment tracking portal, that allows you to track the vessel for your container number.
Once your goods arrive you log in to your ERP and decipher the encrypted delivery docket so you can receipt the goods and pay your invoice through your accounting tool.
That’s a job well done, and it only took you 7 different platforms to get there.
ERP, PDF, Email, Spreadsheet, Freight forwarder portal, ERP again, Accounting tool.
Multiple platforms - How Orderlink Solves Your Problem:
Orderlink is an end-end inbound supply chain solution that can be managed in one platform.
From PO creation to paying the invoice.
Order milestones are generated right from the time your supplier accepts the order until your goods arrive at their destination.
Collaboration with stakeholders is all done through Orderlink’s collaboration portal. Whether you are an admin, editor, or viewer all communication is visible inside the order.
This saves communication from key stakeholder being missed in email and just think about the time and effort you save from trying to juggle all these different platforms.
So next time you need info on your order, logon to Orderlink. There’s no need to look anywhere else.
Click here for part 3.
