The order-to-cash (O2C) process underpins a company’s success, and it plays a big role in fostering a relationship with the customer. While a multitude of businesses focus acutely on their resources up until the customer places an order, increasing the efficiency of the O2C process can yield remarkable benefits.
The good news is that multiple functions involved in O2C can be improved on a significant basis through the use of a data integration solution. It allows organizations to provide global supply chain visibility to their B2B customers. Business users can gain better visibility into each of these processes/systems and they can provide the necessary alerts/notifications to the appropriate stakeholders to keep them informed about their orders or goods. To boot, they can streamline the O2C process from beginning to end to serve customers faster and more effectively, minimize errors and delays, and ensure that the performance data has a colossal impact on the company.
What is an Order-to-Cash Process?
Order to cash, preferably called O2C or OTC, refers to the processes involved when a company receives and processes customer sales orders for goods and services including payment.
These processes begin the moment when a customer places an order. The steps prior to that encompass a lot of other steps: branding, marketing, and sales. While it’s true that these steps do not immediately cease when a customer places an order, their main activities are particularly located in the customer relationship phase that takes place before the cycle begins.
A common notion says that an O2C process is complete when the order is received and the payment is done. There are some other important steps that occur after these actions. The data registered through the life of the order-to-cash cycle needs to be analyzed by the business user so that management or leaders can identify opportunities for improvement and help optimize them.
Why Do Companies Must Optimize Them?
Any company, big or small, should strive to optimize the order-to-cash cycle for a number of reasons. By doing that, users can gain increased visibility into various supply chain operations including, supply chain management, labor, and inventory management, and in turn, streamline them. Functions carried out during O2C processes determine the company’s cash inflows. When delays are experienced in this, problems related to payable, potential acquisitions, payroll, and other liquidity issues occur. Finally, companies with a successful order-to-cash cycle can excel at every function of business including, manufacturing, sales, fulfilment, shipping, and accounting.
How Can Data Integration Accelerate Order-to-Cash Processes?
Data integration platforms make supply chains more resilient that allows them to speed up multiple threads of the order-to-cash cycle.
It’s a fact that before any processes can be automated or customer experiences can be improved, applications and data must be integrated. Here the role of data integration comes into play.
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Packed with self-serve capabilities, modern data integration platforms enable all business users to keep a track of customer data and help them integrate the streams faster for better insights and decision-making. With features like pre-built application connectors, shared templates, dashboards and more, the users can gain more visibility into operations and processes and ultimately accelerate order-to-cash cycles, helping organizations become easier to do business with trading partners or customers.
Following the improvement in the speed and quality of order-to-cash processes, companies can easily find new supply chains to sell into, optimize cash flow, and improve the customer experience.