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Arla Foods Order Automation
Case study:
smaller retail chains. Manual orders represent a small percentage (5%) of the total orders processed, yet this customer segment is of great importance to Arla.
Arla’s customer service team received these orders in a wide variety of formats – including email, spreadsheet, PDF and fax- generated images in the customer’s own format. They would then have to manually key some 1,000 orders per week into the ERP system.
The different methods, formats and templates used by customers to place orders meant that Arla was heavily dependent on its customer service team for processing manual orders and
translating the order information into data meaningful to Arla’s internal systems e.g. Arla’s product codes, and minimum order units.
The main challenge when having such repetitive tasks performed by humans is eliminating error. This is especially important to Arla because of the short shelf-life of fresh dairy products, which cannot easily be collected and sent to another customer when wrongly delivered.
Arla sought a solution for eliminating keying errors that could be implemented quickly and would allow an accurate and fast turnaround of customer orders from fax, email, spreadsheet, and documents.
A solution for ArlaOmPrompt presented Arla with a managed service that required no on-site implementation and could be up and running within weeks.
Nowadays, Arla’s customers continue placing orders as they did before, by fax or mail sent to the customer service team
Arla Foods makes 4,000 deliveries to stores and regional distribution centres a day, supplying a full range of fresh dairy products – including some of the UK’s leading dairy brands – to the major retailers and foodservice customers in the UK.
Seeking to eliminate errorArla’s customer service function has the responsibility for placing orders for all Arla customers.
Most of these orders are received electronically through an EDI connection with the big grocery chains; the balance, 48,000 orders per annum, are manual orders placed by independent stores and
With a turnover of £2 billion, and a yearly combined milk pool of 3.2 billion litres, Arla Foods is the UK’s number one dairy company and the largest supplier of butter, spreads and cheese in the country.
Since switching on the OmPrompt service in April 2012, the number of manual orders has been reduced by 80%, with higher levels of automation expected in the next project phases.
Order processing has been significantly streamlined, with orders now being placed automatically, without error, in seconds.
Order entry accuracy has increased from 98.6% to 100%, virtually eradicating operational error due to incorrect orders and the cost associated with dealing with delivery claims and complaints. Arla is judged on service and customers are very satisfied with 100% of deliveries that arrive on-time-in-full.
Not only has the project improved customer service by eliminating order processing errors, but it has freed customer contact resources who can now spend more time on value-added activity.
Malcom Hamilton, Customer Services Manager at Arla, who led the project comments: “They are now involved in tasks such as ensuring that goods arrive on time and in good condition, proactively
in a wide variety of formats. Orders are auto-forwarded to the OmPrompt platform, which identifies order fields in the document and extracts the required data, and then uses logic to validate the information. This ensures that all the necessary fields have been received, are valid and comply with Arla’s business rules, such as minimum quantities, units of measure and product codes. Clean, valid orders are then sent by the OmPrompt platform to Arla’s ERP system.
Due to the quality of some faxes – for example, re-faxed information, which falls into the exception category – some data is routed to an OmPrompt operator for human validation. The operator constantly monitors the process and complements the system with human interaction and checking where required.
Two birds with one stoneThe objectives of this project were to realign Arla’s Customer Service Team and enhance customer service through increased order accuracy.
Case study:Arla Foods
calling customers to advise when a delivery is going to be late, tracking vehicle availability, and promoting Arla’s products. Thanks to order automation, the team now has the extra time to focus on tasks that add real value to Arla and its customers.”
In Arla’s last global colleague survey, the customer service team reported that being given the opportunity to spend additional time on higher value activities contributed to enhanced job satisfaction.
Malcom continues: “With more time available, the team has been able to benefit from additional training and up-skilling. In fact, a number of processes that used to be implemented by managers, have now been delegated to customer service staff. This has enriched jobs and contributed further to quality of service and customer satisfaction. Overall, we have further enhanced our customer service offering to the benefit of all customers”.
A managed service not just SaaSThere are many order automation tools in the market, but most of them rely on imposing standards. While this approach is effective in most business-supplier scenarios it doesn’t work with customers, who would rather change supplier than be forced to operate in a way that was alien to them.
A managed service rather than just a SaaS solution, OmPrompt Order Automation happens seamlessly, in the background, without anyone noticing. An OmPrompt operator continually monitors the system and steps in – where there is a discrepancy – to amend or validate an entry.
“OmPrompt combines technology, people and process to provide multi-format support, accelerated exception management and intelligent business rules.”
Since implementing OmPrompt Order Automation, order entry accuracy has increased from 98.6% to 100%, virtually eradicating operational error due to incorrect orders.
About OmPromptAs the pioneer of customer automation management, OmPrompt is helping a growing number of the world’s leading brands to eliminate gaps in their order-to-cash processes that have previously required manual workarounds.
OmPrompt’s innovative approach to automating repetitive work in the customer management cycle is enabling clients to free up resources, manage by exception, remove restrictions and eliminate risks to their business.
Based in Oxfordshire UK, OmPrompt processes transactions for global brands in 35 countries on five continents.
Learn moreTo learn more about how customer automation management could help your organisation achieve transactional excellence, download our latest white paper at http://offers.omprompt.com/cam
OmPrompt Ltd67 Innovation DriveMilton ParkAbingdonOxfordshireOX14 4RQUK
+44 (0)1235 436000
Join the Customer Automation Management Group
Many organisations have already achieved dramatic efficiency improve-ments in their procure-to-pay cycles by driving their suppliers to adopt standardised processes and technol-ogy solutions such as eInvoicing. At first glance, we may think that the same gains can be achieved by implementing a similarly standardised approach to the processes within the order-to-cash cycle.
But here’s the challenge: the standard-ised, simplifying mind-set that has worked so effectively in increasing procure-to-pay efficiencies will struggle to cope with the diverse range of customer message formats and business processes that are inevitable in any complex business environment.In fact, insisting on a rigid, stan-dardised approach to processing orders runs a real risk of alienating the customers your sales force has worked so hard to acquire. In most competitive
Introduction
3. OmPrompt. Using arrows to make stars of your customer facing team.
business environments, suppliers have to find ways of accommodating the many diverse ways with which their customers choose to place orders.This is why, in most markets, EDI has only succeeded in automating part of the order processing workload – the generally accepted figures lie somewhere between 30–70%. The remaining orders are received in a variety of formats that typically involve some form of manual intervention at one or more stages in the order-to-cash cycle.
This diversity is not just restricted to order formats: increasingly, customers have specific requirements and expectations in other areas. They may, for example, want consignment stock, vendor-managed inventory or call-off orders managed and reported on in a certain way. Or they may expect any returns to be managed according to their own defined process.
Accommodating these customer- specific process requirements can become a condition of doing business with their organisation – and assuming that we do not wish to turn their business away, we need to find ways of dealing with the customer’s expecta-tions. All-too-often, this creates yet another set of customer-specific workarounds.
Trying to impose standards on their operational diversity can easily alienate your hard-won customers.
Customer contact resources that should be focused on delivering a superior customer experience are being repeatedly redirected to bridging the gaps in back office processes.
Is it really possible to deliver
superior customer service and
transactional excellence at
the same time?
OmPrompt Executive Briefing
Using arrows to
make stars of
your customer
facing teams.
OmPrompt Order Automation is based on a unique combination of processes, people and software, providing a genuine opportunity for automation and – crucially for Arla – extremely high levels of reliability.
By separating order processing from customer service, Arla has been able develop a process that embraces customers’ operational diversity and delivers on customers’ order accuracy needs.
Continuous improvement through customer automation managementArla has automated other manual processes with OmPrompt Customer Automation Management suite of services.
Says Malcom Hamilton: “OmPrompt provides a lot more than order automation, which is what they are best known for. They have helped Arla successfully streamline a number of transactional processes including: claims processing and validation, delivery visibility, and we are currently working on a project that will result in the automation of customer complaints.
These initiatives have reduced operational error, released customer contact staff to higher value tasks, and increased customer satisfaction. The effect of OmPrompt Customer Automation Management on Arla ‘s operations has been very positive”.
Overall, process automation at Arla Foods has not stopped with manual orders. By continuing to build seamless back-office processes and investing in customer contact staff, in line with its continuous improvement ethos, Arla is building a superior customer experience as a source of competitive advantage.
Arla’s customer service team used to manually key 1,000 email, spreadsheet, PDF and fax orders per week into the ERP system.
