RL - Manufacturing

axway.com Benefits of a proactive supply chain — three use cases Retailer drop ship The challenge Drop ship has the power to extend the reach of your offering, particularly when you open the process to mobile applications. This is true whether you are shipping to a retail outlet for pickup or sending items directly to your client. But along with the drop ship promise comes an offsetting risk — any errors in the process will immediately be exposed to your customer, such as: • Product substitution — your client receives what they did not order • Disagreement on units of measure — your customer ordered a dozen and receives only one • Product out of stock — your customer receives nothing • Short ship — your customer receives only a portion of their order Whatever the error, your challenge is to detect such conditions and remedy them before they disappoint your customer. All too often it takes a customer complaint before a business is aware of a mistake. Then the problem must be "patched up," costing time and money and turning what could have been a positive customer experience into a negative one for your business and brand. The solution Using an operational intelligence solution that automates the cross-checking process, you can detect errors immediately and notify the right person, at the right time, to prevent an erroneous shipment from upsetting your customer. The right operational intelligence solution can observe the entire drop ship process, end-to end, across all order and delivery platforms. Every aspect of the process can be monitored and analyzed, providing you with an opportunity to improve your business process. The benefit The primary benefits of operational intelligence are increased accuracy of the drop ship operation and high levels of client satisfaction. These benefits reduce the cost of returns and restocking and help ensure repeat business. The secondary benefit of drop ship operational intelligence is that it enables you to apply behavioral analytics to vendor performance in the areas of timeliness, accuracy and consistency. This data can be used to continually improve the customer experience. For example, let's say an erroneous update to the product catalog changes the "unit of measure" for several items from single units to groups of ten. As customers begin ordering from the updated catalog, the ship notices do not match the purchase orders, causing a spike in ASNs that can't be reconciled to the original purchase order. Fortunately, the imbalance is detected immediately by the operational intelligence solution. A short investigation quickly identifies the error and operations revert to the previous catalog without disruption to online activity. Reducing Days Sales Outstanding (dso) The challenge As companies strive to improve working capital operating ratios, a common objective is emerging for CEOs, CFOs, and CIOs: reduce days sales outstanding (DSO). Achieving this goal can be tricky, however, because what used to be a straightforward task — generating, printing and mailing invoices — has morphed into a complex order-to-cash cycle often supported by an unruly hybrid of legacy paper-based processes and new electronic systems and applications. More than half of all channel inefficiencies reside in the order-to-cash cycle, where processing errors, chargeback and rebate disputes – and a lack of visibility into multi- enterprise processes – all result in high DSO, and therefore insufficient working capital. The solution A robust operational intelligence solution can alert the right person at the right time when invoices are at risk of being sent late due to internal integration issues – for example, when: • Invoices contain errors during EDI translation • Invoices are sent via the B2B gateway but the payer's system does not send acknowledgments • Invoices are received by payers but rejected during the three-way matching process The benefit With real-time monitoring and control over your order-to- cash cycle, you'll know exactly what's happening and when,

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