Order Processing Management and Status for Manufacturers

Have you considered why customers are so persistent about getting their tracking number instead of being okay with a “your order shipped” statement? We humans are curious. We like to know what’s happening behind the curtains. We make plans, and we want data to inform us of these plans. What does a tracking number unlock? Detailed transparency.

Yet, before a customer looks for a tracking number, they ask another critical question: “What is the status of my order?”

This question is asked the moment the order is placed and continues until it is shipped. It ends upon shipment because the freight carrier provides a play-by-play view of the shipment—complete transparency.

Pre-shipment order process is communicating the status to the customer in a systematic manner:

• Milestones need to be captured within the manufacturing process. This can be done individually or en masse, similar to how UPS indicates that your package arrived in their Louisville, KY sorting facility.
• These milestones need to be designated digitally. This could be as “simple” as someone designated on the floor to input lot number updates (albeit workforce issues make this more complicated). This could be more complex when tying machine status into your ERP.
• Once these statuses are tracked digitally, the next step is to bridge it into your customer-facing eCommerce system. This could be tracked by lot number and then associated up to the order.
• Customers will be notified by email of these status changes.

Order processing is as simple as a point in time, an order, and the stage in a process pipeline.

This table represents a manual log book or database entries, with each order having daily entries. This type of tracking will allow for potentially advanced calculation methods, such as using Machine Learning (ML) to predict the time until shipping (there are still some complications that need to be worked through).

When should a manufacturing company start looking for an order processing system?

If you are not “there” yet, you will want to consider the pieces and what it will take to integrate them in a digital flow of data. At the most basic level, you can assign responsibility to someone to manually check on each in-process order to correlate its status to a list. This will take time, and considering the workforce challenges that most manufacturers face, this type of data entry is unlikely to be consistent over time.

Instead, we recommend you evaluate an ERP:

• Acumatica is our preferred platform of choice. They also have a pre-built link to eCommerce tools like BigCommerce.
• Microsoft Dynamics is one of the most full-featured ERPs for manufacturers. Extensible and unbelievably powerful.
• Epicor Prophet 21, capable and economical. There are integrations available to reduce integration timelines and costs.

Implementing an ERP will force you to implement the necessary processes, which will make it easy to share this detailed information with your customers.

The gold standard for manufacturing orders: the “Dominos Pizza Tracker”.

Domino’s has significantly invested in solving this pain point through its tracker: the delivery process is transparent. You know how it will work, and you know when your pizza will arrive.

We must ask the following question: Should you implement something this detailed? That would be nice, and your customers will love it, but it might not make sense from a business perspective.

How Order Processing Management should look from your customer’s perspective.

Customers can log in, see their list of orders, see the delivery status, and even get an estimated delivery date—features ready to go out of the box.

The only thing that would potentially still have to be built is the link between your ERP and the customer portal or eCommerce application.

What order processing platforms are out there? How much do they cost? 

The following solutions do not have native eCommerce integrations: you would need to have a connection built to your ERP.

Four revenue-boosting advantages when customers have visibility into the process.

This builds trust. We all know that trust is the foundation for any business relationship.

Your customers will feel comfortable with you, and process surprises will be eliminated or reduced. The process will be known and transparent to your customers. The more your customers trust you, the more likely they are to come back.

More opportunities to put additional products or services in front of them.

We are talking about a customer portal here: a place on your website that can be customized in any way desired. This means you have “free” advertising space to show off new case studies or products. You no longer rely exclusively on your salespeople or (ignored) emails.

Your customers will plan around this visibility, giving them more certainty with their production processes.

This is likely a scary benefit as it’s a double-edged sword. In many ways, you do not want your customer holding you to specific dates (as much as possible) because this can wreak havoc on your production processes. Customers love this information, and this can massively set you apart in the competitive world (especially looking at international space).

Your customers will understand this is an investment in technology beyond most or all of our competition.

Few people want to work with companies that are behind the eight ball. Companies that set the standard have an allure that is hard to match. Set the standard, make everyone play catch-up, and bring value to your customers, and you have a clear competitive advantage.

How do we determine the order process status steps?

The number of steps shown to a customer strikes a delicate balance between too much (open to nitpicks or diverse manufacturing processes) and too little (transparency).

We ask these questions when making this decision:

• Can we encompass manufacturing process diversity in a given step?
• How does knowing this benefit the customer? For example, you may have multiple statuses for creating plastic injection molding forms. The customer needs to see “In Setup.”
• How reliably can we communicate these statuses? Too many may mean more points for the workflow to break.

We recommend using this rough template:

• Queued
• In Setup
• In [Process Name] or In Production
• Quality Assurance
• Packaging
• Shipped

Another good rule of thumb is establishing a list that is unlikely to change more than once daily.

In an ideal world, we would also update the Estimated Ship Date at each step, reducing the buffer the closer we get to shipment.

How do we determine the Estimated Ship Date?

This is the most challenging part of the process. While it’s “easy” to determine the status, the Estimated Ship Date is the culmination of a knowable manufacturing process. It’s difficult but a critical part of orders even outside the digital space.

This is a calculation based on:

• The number of orders in the pipeline (scheduling)
• The complexity of setting up
• The production difficulty
• The time to prepare for shipment

At the beginning, this may be a manual process, and that’s ok. As you get more sophisticated with order management, you will be able to automate specific pieces and eventually the entire process.

The digital bridge between the manufacturing floor and your customer.

Once this data is in your ERP, it must be connected via a data pipeline to the server. This pipeline will be configured based on the internal ERP and the public-facing side.

While we wouldn’t make a final recommendation based on the data pipeline, it will often play a key part. If this is custom-built, it is much more prone to breakage. We look for an out-of-the-box solution first. Custom is a backup—it’s possible to build but more costly in the long run.

Here are a few of the tools we use to connect with BigCommerce—highly dependent on the ERP applications:

• Epicor E10/E11: Jitterbit or Clarity
• Epicor Prophet: Modern Retail
• Netsuite: Celigo
• Acumatica: Acumatica native integration

The customer-facing side is less of a driver as most connectors work with most eCommerce applications.

Challenges with digitizing the order process.

Communicating regular but unexpected delays

Things happen. Machines break. Raw materials are back-ordered. Shipping over the holidays takes way longer than it should.

You need two things:

1. Never state “Shipping date” with complete certainty. Give yourself some breathing room with “Estimated Shipping Date”.
2. Build a process for notifying your customers when an order date is moved into the future. This could be as simple as salespeople watching these numbers and firing off an email. Or, it could be more complex, like something we’ve built to automate these emails.

The integration breaks

While the integration should have contingency and notification for breakage, things happen. When it is broken, your team can manually update the status, which is also a royal pain. This is why we want to balance the number of communicated statuses. If these change several times daily, this will be too much to manage.

Manual actions don’t happen

If this communication relies on human operators to change data, thus changing status, you now have an unavoidable weak link. This is not a problem, but it needs to be accounted for in one of two ways:

• Eliminate these actions over time.
• Strictly “enforcement” through signage and checkpoints.

Rush projects or customer-introduced anomalies

These contingencies are likely only to affect the Estimated Ship Date. The customer must be notified after this date is pushed into the future. This could be a phone call or an automated email.

You could also create some “exception” statuses to flag these states if necessary.

Assembly line overload

Your salespeople have been working overtime. The Estimated Ship Date needs to be extended into the future, and your customer should be notified.

Critical features in the customer dashboard.

Check order status

Your customers should be able to see the current point in the manufacturing process quickly and the estimated shipping date.

Give visibility to others.

Your customers should be able to share this visibility with stakeholders in the organization. This can be as simple as a Team Management page.

Communicate with you

If your customers have a question, are they able to quickly reach you? Is there contact information near the order status? You are giving customers unprecedented access and they are guaranteed to have questions. View these as strategic touchpoints to 1) connect with the customer and 2) identify areas for improvement.

Frictionless reorder process

Your customer will likely be back thanks to how well your workforce manufactured these products. You need to make it super easy to place another order for the same part.

Pay invoices

This digitally enabled generation is looking for ways to eliminate paperwork. Offer your customers the option to pay online through credit card or ACH.

A real-life example of order status

Grandstand’s order process is interactive: once the customer clicks “Place Order,” an interactive design and approval process starts. Grandstand’s sales and art teams review the art to ensure it will print correctly. The customer signs off. The order is produced and then shipped.

We have built an automated system to send email notifications, keep the order view up-to-date, change statuses, and keep the Estimated Delivery Date fresh.

The result of this is massively reduced customer service requests for superfluous “where is my order” questions.