The life of an order

Take the last order your team received by email. How many times did anyone deal with it?

You can probably see the time that was spent entering it into your ERP. It’s harder to see the call that came before the order, the account note someone checked while processing it, or the invoice request that arrived two weeks later. Those jobs happen at different times, often with different people, but they’re all work generated by the same order.

If you want to understand what manual ordering really costs your business, you need to follow an order all the way through its journey.

An order rarely starts when it reaches your inbox

Say you’re a cleaning and hygiene wholesaler, supplying contract cleaners and public buildings. A customer is restocking one of their sites. Before they order, they call to check whether their usual products are available and ask about the lead time on an item they need urgently.

Later, their purchase order arrives as a PDF attached to an email. Someone opens it, works through the product codes and quantities, and enters the order into the ERP. They check the delivery address and the notes on the account. One note says this customer has a buy-one-get-one-free offer on a particular product, so that needs applying too.

The order goes to the warehouse. The next morning, the customer calls to check whether it has been dispatched. Once it’s delivered, they email for proof of delivery. At the end of the month, their accounts team asks for a copy invoice.

That’s a fairly ordinary order. Yet your team has answered a question before it was placed, entered it, checked the customer’s terms, given an update and retrieved two documents. If any detail on the purchase order was unclear, there may have been another email or call in the middle.

None of those touchpoints are particularly unusual. That’s precisely why the time and the cost is easy to miss. The work is spread across a number days, over emails and the phone, rather than appearing as one neat task called processing an order.

Six minutes per order is only the beginning

Let’s put a number against the part that’s easiest to measure: entering the order.

If your team receives 35 offline orders a day and each takes six minutes to enter, that’s three and a half hours every working day. Over 220 working days, it adds up to 770 hours a year.

At an illustrative fully loaded employment cost of £37,000 a year, and assuming a 7.5-hour working day, that’s roughly £17,300 worth of staff time spent on order entry alone.

That calculation doesn’t include a single stock enquiry, delivery update, proof of delivery request or invoice email. Nor does it include the time spent putting incorrect orders right.

Moving orders online won’t instantly take £17,300 off your payroll. But the time you save is real. It’s time your existing team could use elsewhere, and it affects how many people you need as order volumes grow. Even moving half of those orders online would release around 385 hours of order entry time a year, before counting any reduction in customer enquiries.

What changes when the customer orders online?

The biggest difference is that the customer no longer needs your team to act as the route to basic information.

With an integrated ecommerce site, they can log in and see the products available to them, their own prices, stock information and lead times. They can find previous orders and place a repeat order without emailing or calling in. The order can then flow into your ERP without somebody typing out every line again.

The same online account can give them access to order status, delivery tracking, proof of delivery and invoices. When they need an update, they can look it up at the time that suits them, rather than waiting for someone in your office to find it and reply.

For that to work well, the information needs to be accurate and the website needs to connect properly with the systems running your business. Otherwise, the questions and rekeying simply turn up somewhere else.

Of course, customers will still call when they need advice, have an unusual requirement or encounter a problem. Those are conversations where your team can make a difference. A routine re-order, a status check or a request for an invoice doesn’t always need the same human attention.

Try following ten orders

If you’re curious what this looks like in your business, pick ten recent orders that came in by phone or email. Look beyond the time it took to enter each one. How many calls or emails did it generate before and after? How often did someone have to find information the customer couldn’t see for themselves?

You may find that order entry is the biggest task. You may find that the follow-up work takes just as much time. Either way, you’ll have a clearer picture of what each order asks of your team.

That’s the hidden cost of manual ordering: rarely one expensive job, but a series of small ones that repeat every day. Give customers a better way to order and find the information they need, and many of those touches disappear. Your team gets time back, customers get answers faster, and the business can handle more orders without the admin growing at the same rate.

If you’d like to explore what that could look like for your business, book a call with us.