The problem

Management of orders is a tedious task and order management systems in general face with the challenge of dealing with orders which are in various statuses spread across multiple teams. Management of orders in an effective manner will minimize any negative impacts while being financially beneficial for the company. This issue is predominantly affected by the manually inputted order forms and the inability of spreadsheet software to effectively provide a solution for the business’s unique organization structure and order management procedure. There were various problems identified during the requirement analysis. Among these was the usage of spreadsheet software to manage orders which opened up a cluster of issues such as:

Lack of document organization
Spreadsheets were used for data entry with the use of separate sheets which increases the tendency for human error while entering data via cognitive aspects. When data is being analyzed for business purposes it is difficult to get a collective overview.
For each and every month of the year, there exists files which consists of a separate spreadsheet, customer quotation emails, customer preference documents, and other related documents as a whole which resulted in confusion and mixing-up. Sorting them and fetching information resulted in valuable time thrown to waste.

Risk of losing data and records
While data is entered into spreadsheets, they were also entered in manual record books. This impacts the sales representative commission calculation, job card issuing, scheduled reports, measurements, engineer recommendations, and even customer details. Because of this there were conflicts between the two record-keeping methods used and always required back and forth verifications. In addition, it created the need to update the same record in multiple places, and data redundancy. Even the manual records and spreadsheets have a tendency of being lost.

Dependency and delegation issues
The previous process was handled by the chief accountant and his assistant accountants. This limitation created the inability to enter or retrieve important data and information in the absence of this staff. Sometimes valuable time was wasted waiting for the availability of the users in order to retrieve or update even a single record.

Security issues and undefined access levels
When the records were maintained manually and as spreadsheets, they can be accessed by different individuals or other external parties without proper authority. The previous process did not contain any restrictions which allowed anyone to go through the details without any restriction whatsoever. The access levels were not properly set to make sure that the information is viewed and accessed by the intended users only.

Order statuses and payments were not managed effectively
Once a job is completed and payments were received, they were not clearly shown in a clear and concise manner. This made it difficult to easily identify payment details and job completion decreased direct visual identification of payment and job statuses. Showing that a payment is received or not clearly allows the company to take necessary actions to make sure that there is cash flow and also maintain a high rate of customer satisfaction.

Low user-friendliness
The previous process involved an off-the-shelf spreadsheet management software which includes components which doesn’t align with the organizational needs. The interface was not customizable to fit user needs thereby restricting a user-friendliness.