Price increases: the other side of the coin
A lot of companies are answering the high inflation environment with price increases. But we believe that companies need to rethink their answer far beyond the traditional commercial levers. Learn how you can make a difference and increase margins in this article.
A recent McKinsey study shows that inflation is among the top 3 concerns of senior decision-makers. The current economic environment puts a lot of pressure on companies. Especially cost increases have an enormous impact because that’s where the money is spent: on labor, energy, materials, logistic services, … Chances are high that you company is answering to this challenge with a price increase. Which makes perfectly sense. But we believe that companies need to rethink their response to these costs increases far beyond conventional commercial levers. Smart decisions on the underlying costs of your order intake process, for example, can have a transformative impact on your organization’s cost base. In this article, we want to take a look at the other side of the coin of increasing prices.
The effects of a price increase on your order intake process
While increasing your prices might seem like a valid response to the current increasing costs, it can still mean that your margins keep on getting thinner if you don’t operate on it in the right way. This can put additional pressure on your organization.
Price increases require additional manual work
Increasing your prices is not something you do in the blink of an eye. Your entire ERP and/or CRM system needs to change. Furthermore, your sales team needs education on the new prices. A mix of orders/contract in old and new pricing increases the need for more manual work. Your sales team needs extra validations and cross-checking to ensure accuracy. Which also increases the risk of errors.
Price increases change customer expectations
The increasing costs do not only affect your organization, but your clients also have the same challenge. Their expectations might change in 2 ways:
- ⏱️ They will expect faster processing times and improved accuracy for a higher price.
- 💬 Their procurement will get stricter, meaning your sales team will have to put more time into guiding this sales process.
This means your company will have to manually ensure that these expectations are met.
Price increases result in a higher order processing cost
These above challenge result in a higher processing cost, since your team has to put more manual work into handling the same orders. This means less time for actual advice and customer-facing moments, lower accuracy and more risks for errors. Some companies are even feeling the need to expand their team to keep up with the manual work resulting from these price changes.
So now you’re in a situation where your increased prices have put more pressure on thinner margins than anticipated before.
Luckily, more leaders are embracing the opportunities that technology brings to their fingertips. Artificial Intelligence can help your company to minimize this additional manual work. Automation of incoming orders can help to increase efficiency, improve accuracy, and reduce the need for manual data entry, validation and cross-checking, freeing up your employees to focus on value-adding tasks.
Automating your order intake process
Maybe you’ve been looking into solutions to automate your sales order process before. Chances are high, OCR technology was one of them. But since orders can enter your organization in many ways and there is no actual fixed template to do so, an OCR technology alone will not help you forward. OCR technologies need high maintenance and this would only increase costs further.
You need an intelligent solution that is able to not only mimic your sales team’s behaviour but has the same intelligence to process an incoming order. Intelligent Document Processing is a technology that was built to do so. With its underlying artificial intelligence and machine learning engines, it is able to retrieve data from any document and email on its own.
With easy integrations, it’s possible to automate this order intake process end-to-end. Furthermore, machine learning engines learn from humans. This means that when the engine is not confident enough, it will ask for the input of a human to help them while learning from it. This results in higher automation rates over time.
IDP has proven benefits
- Faster order processing
- Higher accuracy rates and fewer errors
- More time for your sales team to focus on complex orders and advising clients
- Better customer experience
- Happier employees
- All resulting in lower processing costs
Curious to know more?
We would like to invite you to our upcoming webinar about order automation on Thursday April 20 at 11:30am.
You’ll get a detailed explanation about how it works and how you can calculate ROI upfront.
Table of Contents
Some stories about companies that are automating their order intake process with Metamaze.
Discover how manufacturer Group Nivelles saves 70 hrs/month/FTE and lowers order processing costs by 64% by implementing Metamaze.
Discover how Robonext & Metamaze resulted in automation of more than 80% of incoming orders and 80% reduction in errors.
Learn how Sports & Leisure Group automatically extracts information from invoices and orders and enters that information in SAP.
