The speed of your order entry impacts your delivery business’ overall efficiency. If an order is entered quickly, but incorrectly, the time it takes to make those changes will likely negate the speed of order entry. To optimize your company's efficiency, you must have a fast and accurate order entry process.
Below are six tips to help improve the speed and accuracy of your order entry process.
1. Know Your Order Entry Interface
Your ability to enter orders accurately and efficiently will depend on how well you know how to use the order entry interface. The more familiar that you become with the interface, the more intuitive that order entry will become.
Practice using your interface to be sure that you fully understand how it works. With many interfaces, you will be able to use keyboard shortcuts and other features to minimize your keystrokes when entering orders. Thoroughly test and explore your interface to discover how you can maximize your speed.
2. Think Ahead
Will the order that you are entering need to be tracked? How will the customer be billed for the order? What kind of reports will need to be generated? Everything that can happen to the order in the future can be prepared for during order entry.
The information that you input will likely be useful to your customers and other parts of your company. Be sure to keep track of all order information and communicate with other levels of your company to ensure that orders are entered, tracked, delivered, and billed properly.
Courier software, such as OnTime, can help you to ensure that information is generated and available as your company and customers require. Invoicing, tracking, and other features can be accessed through multiple programs. With OnTime, most of your preparations can be made ahead of time.
3. Be Flexible
Orders may have special circumstances, or may require unexpected changes. For example, you may need to set up orders ahead of time, on offset schedules, or with unique information fields. If an order that you are entering has complex circumstances, you must be equipped to place the order and move forward, without lapses in accuracy or speed.
Be sure that you know exactly how to handle any special order circumstances that your company may encounter. Know your company’s policy, understand your customer’s desires, and follow the other tips posted here to prepare for any possible scenario.
If the system that you are currently using to enter orders is impeding your ability to be flexible, consider using OnTime or another courier software. Save orders for the future, generate price quotations, and adjust for virtually every special circumstance by utilizing the features available.
4. Ensure Accurate Pricing
If you prepare an order with inaccurate pricing, corrections will need to be made, and issues may arise. Because those corrections will take up time and company resources, inaccurate pricing will often have a negative impact on your company’s efficiency. Pricing accuracy will also allow you to offer customers the correct prices for quotations and totals.
During order entry, always consider the accuracy of an order’s price before you submit that order. Be sure to check that you are using the right pricing scenario and calculations for each order.
With software such as OnTime, prepare accurate pricing by setting up your pricing scenarios and calculations ahead of time. These scenarios and calculations should be associated with the appropriate customers to guarantee accuracy during order entry.
5. Check for Accurate Information
As with pricing, if the wrong order information is entered, corrections will need to be made. The time that it will take to make these corrections will adversely affect your company’s overall efficiency. Along with accurate pricing scenarios for that order, you will need to guarantee the correct customer, delivery location, pickup location, and more.
Be sure to check all customer, location, and other order information before you submit the order. If you are using previously set up records in courier software, the information will likely be accurate. If new information must be input into your system during order entry, check that everything is entered correctly.
6. Account for Driver Location
Know where your drivers are and where they will be, so that you can give them order assignments that make sense geographically. Keep in contact with your drivers so that you can check with them about their location and other factors, as needed.
Dispatcher and driver communication can benefit from the possibilities afforded by mobile devices and applications. OnTime Mobile works with OnTime Dispatch to relay driver information to dispatchers and to keep your drivers and dispatchers communicating.