Our customer is a leading provider of office products and services and caters to North America, Europe and various international markets. The customer offers a comprehensive product portfolio to consumers with over 1800 retail stores, widely acclaimed e-commerce sites and B2B sales organizations. They operate a global network of wholly owned operations, franchisees and alliance partners.
The Challenge
Decentralized and unstructured order management framework
The customer wanted to focus on building a seamless order management process while optimizing related costs. Much of their challenges were related to region-specific non-standardized processes and platforms. Some of the key challenges were:
- Regional variances in order management processes with independent execution platforms for each country or region
- Failure to improve key metrics and deliver real-time solutions due to lack of a common framework and limited sharing of best practices
- Auto cancellation of store orders and mismatch between selling items and store inventory
- Delivery failures to non-US customers and lack of follow-up on incomplete routes and driver assignments
- Delayed vendor response time and complex PO processing methodology
The Objective
Unifying operations, amplifying efficiency and driving growth
In pursuit of revolutionizing its order management operations, the client partnered with HCLTech to embark on a transformation journey. The project aimed to seamlessly integrate disparate business operations, fortify order processes and eliminate revenue leakages due to issues related to cancellations, delivery failures and delays in order processing. The client also wanted to grow sales by improving existing account penetration, cross-selling and up-selling products from adjacent categories and increasing the share of wallet.
The Solution
Standardization, consolidation and governance for operational efficiency
The collaboration with HCLTech laid the foundation for a transformational journey characterized by strategic point solutions addressing key operational gaps identified through an intensive process mapping exercise.
- Navigating complexity with governance and metrics alignment
- Developed a comprehensive governance mechanism aligning operations across regional sales, order management and vendor groups.
- Established an operational and business metrics hierarchy supported by a dashboard reporting framework to ensure process effectiveness.
- Enhancing customer experience and sales optimization
- Enabled sophisticated product recommendations, tapping into cross-selling and up-selling opportunities for customers.
- Maintained an in-house supplier catalog and vendor database, enhancing non-standard product sourcing and boosting quote-to-order conversions.
- Removing complexities with sourcing efficiency and price optimization
- Initiated a price match study and research for locating the requested products, best prices and lead time across vendors.
- Introduced a unified product catalog and in-store drop shipping to manage virtual inventory seamlessly.
- Closing revenue leakages with operational agility and process refinement
- Instituted new metrics and service levels to monitor order aging and promptly address orders on hold.
- Proactively pursued order reconciliation and enforced continuous monitoring and issue resolution.
- Uncovering opportunities with technology-driven insights
- Utilized IBM Cognos Analytics for precise insights on products, addresses and logistics, enabling data-driven decision-making.
- Tracked driver availability and optimized route planning to ensure efficient and timely deliveries.
- Fortifying revenue streams
- Vigilantly followed up on incomplete orders, tracked open purchase orders and expedited vendors to maintain scheduled deliveries.
- The combined efforts effectively curtailed cancellations, delivery failures and order processing delays.
- Fostering customer relationships and category growth
- Leveraged effective product recommendations to deepen account-level penetration and amplify cross-selling opportunities.
- Innovated through upselling products from adjacent categories, expanding the share of wallet within existing accounts.
Impact
A resounding success with enhanced resolutions, conversions and revenue
Through meticulous integration, steadfast operational refinement and intelligent technology enablement, the client transcended its operational challenges. Revenue leakages were plugged, order processes streamlined and sales growth achieved.
Reduction in TCO vs onshore costs
Quote-to-order conversion
Reduction in order-to-cash timeline
on-time orders delivery
“Virtual warehouse” vendor issues resolved
Revenue generated through product recommendations
Revenue generated through up-sell and cross-sell
Worth of products sourced through supplier lead-time reduction
CSAT across support processes
Increase in customer revenue through cross-sell and up-sell
