Packaging companies face unique challenges when it comes to ordering lifecycles. The complexity of customer requirements makes it difficult to envision any sort of process improvement in customer experience. Yet the reliance on humans to store and process business information creates data governance problems. Internally, it’s hard to find one source of truth for data surrounding orders, products, and customer accounts. SAP ERP should be this source of truth, yet due to the complexity of the order-to-cash process, crucial information often lives in sticky notes on your employees’ monitors—or worse, in their heads. This practice leads to lost orders, production delays, and an unnecessarily long order-to-cash cycle. That’s why today’s packaging companies are pursuing strategies that marry a self-service customer portal with SAP ERP data cleansing. Surprisingly, these two initiatives work hand-in-glove to improve customer experience and eliminate waste in internal processes. In this whitepaper, we’ll look at 5 components of a smart transformation plan that you can use to pursue this strategy. But first, we’ll cover the distinction between make-and-ship and warehouse customers. That’s foundational to everything else.

Make-and-ship vs. warehouse customers

Most packaging manufacturers work with 2 types of customers.

• Make-and-ship customers. With lower volumes and faster turnaround times, these customers don’t need warehousing terms. You ship their items out the door once they’ve been manufactured.
• Warehouse customers. These customers have more specialized needs. They often order at higher volumes with longer lead times, but they don’t (or can’t) store inventory themselves. You produce inventory for them and hold it in a warehouse until they need it. They request to release product from their private inventory.

As every packaging company knows, warehousing is essential to compete in the industry. Customers expect you to have a warehouse close to their location where you can store their products until they request to release them. Localized warehousing ensures that lead times aren’t an issue. It also helps customers avoid storage costs and respond to swings in demand. Clearly, warehouse customers have vastly different lifecycles from make-and-ship customers. As we look at tactics for improving your ordering processes, we’ll examine ways in which you can impact both customer convenience and your own operational efficiency for each type of customer. Now, on to the 5 components of a smart transformation plan.

If you want to roll out in phases, you’ll want to find a portal platform that’s built to support this path. That’s why the Corevist Platform makes it easy to start with self-service post-order care, then add email order automation, order placement, and stock releasing on the same platform.

Believe it or not, you can do this data cleansing in conjunction with the customer portal project. Let’s talk about that.

3. Plan to cleanse your SAP ERP data as you go

4. Plan to automate email PO’s

Not all aspects of a seamless ordering cycle are obvious to customers. Automating email PO’s is one of those things. Customers won’t necessarily know you’re doing it, but it frees up your reps to spend more time acting as strategic advisors, which directly impacts your value to the customer. What’s more, automated processing gets those orders to production faster. It shortens the ordering cycle for both warehousing and make-and-ship customers. With the lead-times that are typical in the packaging industry, this makes a huge impact. How to automate email PO’s A decent customer portal platform should include the capability to automate email orders and post them to SAP hands-free (assuming there are no errors). That’s the thinking behind Corevist BuyBot (available as an add-on to the Corevist Platform). This automated utility reads incoming PDF orders attached to emails and simulates them against the relevant business rules in SAP. BuyBot checks the customer’s allowable SKUs, contract pricing, quantity rounding rules, and more. If the order doesn’t contain errors, BuyBot posts it to SAP instantly, using the SAP integration architecture that comes with the Corevist Platform. If BuyBot detects errors, it routes the order to your customer service team for review.

5. Plan to offer true self-service order placement

Imagine an ordering process in which a customer builds their own order in a self-service shopping cart, then posts it instantly to SAP ERP. The order doesn’t require manual intervention because it conforms 100% to the relevant SAP business rules. This might sound impossible in the packaging industry, but it’s quite doable. (Just ask Emmerson Packaging.) When you give customers the responsibility to create well-formed orders, you take that responsibility off your plate. You also push customers to know their own needs and your products better. When customers engage more deeply on this level, they gain control over the process, which takes away fear and ambiguity. Empowering customers to place error-free orders Some processes will always require back-and-forth human interaction. If a warehousing customer has highly specific requirements for a new SKU, or if they need expert advice on specifications, your reps will always play a crucial role. But once that process is over and an SKU exists in SAP, why should your subject matter experts (your reps) have to re-key long PO’s into SAP? That’s not a good use of their time. A self-service ordering solution empowers your customers to order those finalized SKUs (and/or release them from warehouse stock) on any device. The key here is to offer a customer portal that’s deeply integrated to SAP ERP. This is the best way to provide essential elements of a self-service ordering experience—things like:

• A catalog that shows only the customer’s unique SKUs
• Real-time inventory availability (including support for complex inventory reports displayed dynamically from SAP)
• 100% accurate contract pricing (including dynamic adjustment for quantity discounts)
• Order placement by CSV upload (to support procurement workflows)
• Intelligent error messaging, driven by SAP responses, to help customers fix problems with their orders before placing them
• Only 100% error-free orders accepted and posted to SAP

The last two points are especially important. This is where you give customers the responsibility to create well-formed orders. You can’t do this if you don’t empower them with intelligent error messaging to help them fix problems. While SAP spits out error responses, you need an additional communication layer in the customer portal to translate those outputs into messages that your customers will understand. A solution like the Corevist Platform takes care of this.

Question: Is this the end of customer service?

Absolutely not! In fact, customers need more human insight than ever when sourcing packaging. The key here is not to replace your reps, but to elevate them. With mundane tasks taken off their plate—things like providing order status, credit status, or entering PO’s into SAP—you empower your reps to put their expertise to use. They can pivot to highly strategic roles as customer advisors and product experts. Ultimately, that benefits everyone involved. Customers get more time with the experts to figure out their needs and design solutions. They also get faster turnaround times on orders. Reps get more rewarding work, as they’re asked to play a crucial, strategic role in customer success. This role requires subject matter expertise, which allows reps to flex their muscles with helpful industry knowledge. Your operations get more efficient, too. With humans taken out of the communication chain for routine actions (order tracking, invoice checking, credit status, inventory checks, order placement, etc.), you speed up your order-to-cash cycle. With reps doing more rewarding work, you should also see less churn in your customer service staff. This gives you more opportunity to grow each rep into a subject matter expert who’s invaluable to customers.

Takeaway: Engage an expert partner to help you plan and execute your path

It’s not enough to tackle this with consultants. And it’s not enough to just buy technology. You’ll get better results with a comprehensive partner who not only knows the packaging industry and SAP, but also builds and supports B2B portals and eCommerce solutions on a best-in-class platform. Here at Corevist, we’ve developed the Corevist Platform over 14 years of solving B2B challenges. The platform includes prebuilt, SAP-certified integration for SAP or S/4HANA, and it supports complex use cases in packaging. We manage and support all our solutions and act as strategic advisors on our clients’ next chapters. Ultimately, that’s a great path to a seamless ordering lifecycle.