Service Providers: Are you getting the most out of your Order-to-Cash processes?

In our highly competitive business environment, business growth strategies are often front and centre of corporate initiatives focusing resources on sales pipelines and account management to drive success. And understandably so.

Yet, the Order-to-Cash (OTC) process is as much of a defining factor of an organisation’s success and pivotal to the customer experience. Disparate systems and poorly integrated processes can drain resources, elevate costs and risk, and damage customer relationships. Conversely, a streamlined and flexible OTC process can optimize returns and drive far reaching benefits throughout the organisation.

What is the Order-to-Cash process?

Order-to-Cash encompasses your entire order processing system – from the moment the order is received through to how payment is invoiced and received. It’s best viewed as a timeline: incorporating both the order management process and the bill to cash process. By examining inefficiencies across this timeline and automating processes you’ll shorten the time from order to receipt of payment and subsequently reduce costs and accelerate revenue.

In the world of Telco’s, Managed Service Providers and Utilities companies, where order and billing complexities reign, this can be easily said than done.

Service Providers need to grapple with the complicated rating mechanisms, internal and external data feeds (as well as other supplier billing information), regulatory updates, new product bundles with varying subscription-based pricing, customer plan updates, disparate financial systems and the list goes on.

Any inefficiencies in your OTC process can potentially add up to big issues causing revenue leakage and impacting customer retention.

Signals that your OTC isn’t working for you

Increased billing enquiries, customer complaints, inaccurate invoices (or multiple single-service invoices to the one customer), and delays in interdepartmental analysis can signal inadequacies in your processes.

The first step is to address outdated processes and look at ways to automate across your OTC timeline. Here are some best practice guidelines:

• Minimize the need for manual intervention
• Eliminate data re-entry as much as possible
• Look at optimizing processes by integrating your CRM or order processing systems with back-end financial systems
• Explore suitable integration tools to extract supplier data feeds and automatically update internal systems
• Remove legacy applications and complex workarounds
• Link billing to customer portals or existing websites for collection

Order-to-Cash processes impact every part of the business. Because of their cross functional nature and the complexity of these processes, addressing operational issues which negatively impact your order-to-cash timeline needs a tactical hands-on-approach to sustainable improvements.

Engaging the right OTC automation experts will of course fast track all these tasks for you and most importantly, set in place processes that can grow as your business / portfolio evolves.

Partner with a billing specialist to streamline and future-proof your processes

Outworks delivers specialist, customised billing software and services to eliminate bottlenecks through automation, integrate with your existing systems, and the right information to boost recurring revenue while empowering your customers to review usage plans.

We listen to your needs, analyse your unique requirements then develop customised systems and supporting processes to fit your business. We’ll make sure the solution integrates with your other financial, workflow and CRM systems, evolves with your business and meets your customer demands – now and into the future.

Alternatively, you can outsource all or part of your product and services billing to our team of specialists and we’ll reduce your operating costs and risk. We’ll also take your complex data feeds and accurately manage rating and pricing in line with your products and services.

Outworks consultants can help you with:

• Rating, tariffing and discounting
• Invoice generation and distribution
• Payment processing
• Carrier / Supplier reconciliation

Incorporate branded marketing in your OTC

Strategies for improving OTC processes often overlook the marketing opportunities inherent in the customer touchpoints – such as customised invoices.

At Outworks, we’ll work with you to design a consolidated, customised invoice with detailed consumption breakdowns and flexible advertising segments to promote new offers, as well as service level groupings per site, office, cost centre and even service type.

How can Outworks help you?

Contact Outworks today to discover how we can help you optimize your OTC process.

We’d love to hear from you!