Paul Morrison

Hello and welcome to Retail and Consumer Pulse by WNS - A Capgemini Company.

My name is Paul Morrison, and in this series, we dig into the trends that are shaping industry today.

And in this episode, we're going to look at the complex world of order management, and we will touch on our new solution in the space, OMTRAC developed in collaboration with ServiceNow. To guide us with his expert insights, I'm really delighted to be joined by Abhishek Joshi, WNS Director of Supply Chain Capability and Solutions.

Thanks for being with us today, Abhishek.

Abhishek Joshi

Hey, hi, Paul, it's always a pleasure to connect with you.

I can start with a quick introduction.

I'm Abhishek Joshi.

I lead supply chain capability and solutions practice at WNS.

I carry a blend of industry and consulting experience across multiple facets of supply chain management.

Technology advancements in supply chain have always excited me, and with Systems of Action gaining prominence over System of Records, it cannot be a better time to do this podcast with you.

Paul Morrison

It's great, really great to have you.

Thank you for your time.

I know you've been very busy and travelling, travelling the globe.

So, great to have you.

So, let me set the scene, and then we'll dive into picking your brains on the detail.

But order management.

Let's start off. It's a bit of a conundrum, I think to the outsiders. I think of the outside world.

It's at the core of consumer goods.

It's the core of manufacturing more broadly.

It's made-up of really vital activities around action and order, credit cheques, allocation, fulfilment into logistics.

So it's really at the heart of supply chain.

But it's also, in a number of ways, the most invisible of key business processes, which means that there's this world of chaos, it seems, between quote and cash.

There's a stat that says 95% companies report that their order management is highly challenged and the processes massively fragmented.

It's slowed down by disconnected tools.

So it's often part of the problem, it seems, not the success story.

And it's where revenue and growth ambitions, this really get bogged down.

So, it's, yeah, it's an interesting battleground, as it were.

So, from your perspective in the thick of things, could you give us your perspective on order management and the landscape today?

Abhishek Joshi

Truly, order management is a critical process and it's a revenue impacting process.

Well, there are other processes in supply chain that over time have gained a lot of prominence.

We can never negate the possibility of a good order management process, and how it is going to impact the downstream finance and accounting processes.

Conventionally, order management was always known to be driven through the system of records in an ERP system. This involved manual data entry, fragmented communication and limited visibility.

However, organizations still continue to thrive due to limited business needs.

This legacy system, however, became a nemesis when organizations expanded to new geographies, brought in omni-channels and global customers.

The enhanced network brought in a plethora of problems with respect to the orders.

As order volumes grew, so the inefficiencies became hard to manage, driving up operational costs and making it absolutely impossible to scale.

The absence of real time tracking and analytics further hampered the decision making, while poor exception management led to missed SLAs and dissatisfied customers.

Standardizing of order formats and metadata across customers is pivotal to any digitization story.

However, this being a big change management effort, customers were not willing to adopt to any new solution.

The answer to solve the above problems could have been CRM platforms, had we extended these to manage orders.

However, CRMs have always focused on the upstream presales processes rather than on to management.

So, that's where we are.

When it comes to the situation for order management.

Paul Morrison

Yeah, there's a lot, a lot going on there.

We've got ERP as a sort of fundamental backbone, not able to solve the challenge or not always able to solve the challenge and struggling.

We've got continuous waves of M&A and change scope expansion, product expansion, geography expansion.

So, all of this change that needs to be enabled in the order management process, and the lack of standardization that often follows when you bolt businesses together and CRM. Again, not quite stepping in.

So, it's quite a tall or long list of challenges.

Abhishek Joshi

Let's sort of have a look forward then at the ideal in order management. What are the must-haves, sort of, you know, the fundamentals for a next generation order management system?

Yeah, I can think of some broad themes, how you can improve the order management solutions.

There are two broad things that come to my mind, digitization and orchestration.

Digitization involves automation, generative AI, real time analytics.

Orchestration has more to do with visibility, milestone tracking and data for reporting.

Digitization enables touchless order processing environment by pulling in the necessary information for processing the order from unstructured sources like emails and PDFs, while the orchestration layer provides an end-to-end visibility across teams.

Built in exception handling, proactive alerts, data-driven insights, reduce errors, improve compliance and scale sales order management, operations efficiency, all while delivering the superior customer experience.

Envisioning the single solution to cover end-to-end presales and order management processes is the solution.

Lead generation, prospect, opportunity, quote and order management - all being done in one single solution which is then integrated to the ERP system.

Standardization of orders and metadata using generative AI paves way for the audit digitization.

That's my thought process around how we should be tackling the problem regarding order management.

Paul Morrison

OK, so, that's a very clear statement of the ideal.

And I know that working through the realities we're talking about M&A and the complexity, the lack of standardization is a very complex problem just with, very often, 20% of the transactions driving 80% of the cost.

So, it's a big challenge.

I guess, the key point from your perspective and from that of the WNS capabilities, you know, we've been very busy in this space for a number of years, and in over the last year or so, we've been working very closely with our counterparts at ServiceNow. We've been collaborating with them, and you and the teams have put together a solution to bring all this together.

Perhaps, you could tell us about that which is called OMTRAC.

Can you tell us about it?

And look some key features.

Abhishek Joshi

Yeah, ServiceNow is an industry-recognized solution in the order management space, and all of us know that very well.

Most of our clients have service now and IT, but the challenge is that they've barely exploited its capabilities and continue to use it more as a workflow solution rather than as an order management solution.

What we thought of doing was to develop an OMTRAC solution which is a one stop order management digital solution to digitize and orchestrate orders.

The thought also came to us because there are so many of clients who, as I said, are barely using it to its fullest possibility.

Some are just using it to do the presales processes, which is the lead generation code management, while others are barely using that as a workflow solution just for probably order receipt and not even getting into the stages of doing any bit of reporting or analytics around it.

So, that's the reason why the thought crossed our mind to actually develop something in close collaboration with OMTRAC, and look at all the themes that I talked about earlier to bring to reality.

Now, the way the solution approaches order management is that it has an intelligent engine, which is capable of automatically assigning the request to the appropriate work group.

So, obviously there's an inbuilt workflow and a case management solution.

And as soon as the order hits the OMTRAC engine, it is going to generate a case and automatically assign it to the agent.

It then leverages document intelligence.

Yes, there's an inbuilt document intelligence that the OMTRAC has through which it can classify the attachments.

Now, in a conventional B2B manufacturing order environment, they could be anywhere between 5 to 10 odd documents that come in an order.

They could be, there's obviously the purchase order that is going to come, but there are other administrative reports there.

They can be commercial documents. They can be SOWs and so on.

Now, this feature is a very important feature that helps to classify the attachments in the first place, even if the file names are ambiguous.

The next is the generative AI, where this platform is capable of reading both the structured and the unstructured content within the documents, extract all the relevant order field and populate them into a predefined order creation form, all without any human intervention.

And this is a very critical step, all because any bit of an automation, whether it's done through the conventional RPA or ServiceNow, is only possible when you standardize your metadata.

You cannot expect customers to send you POs, which are in the same format because they want to vary as per customer.

But you can ensure that the metadata is defined and this standard predefined form helps us in doing that.

Each step in the process as I said is governed by a smart workflow ensuring tasks are completed and tracked in real time.

As I said, it has a critical, it has an inbuilt workflow.

So, any critical information that is missing, such as an incomplete customer master data, missing delivery addresses, all that can be contextualized in an e-mail and sent to the requester. If any exceptions arise or updates are needed, OMTRAC instantly notifies the relevant stakeholders, enabling quick resolution through contextual collaboration.

There's also real time analytics.

So, it doesn't end here.

So, post you have processed your order, you can gain full visibility into the end-to-end cycle time.

You could look at SLA performances, exception trends and fulfilment efficiency. But that's the solution, an end-to-end encompassing solution providing you digitization, orchestration and visibility.

Paul Morrison

Right! That's great.

So that's, as you say, an end-to-end solution.
It's a single connected platform.

You mentioned, there's generative AI that is now powering it.

So, this approach wasn't possible a few years ago, in its completeness.

So, it's definitely exciting space and exciting time to be solving these problems.

Perhaps, you could take us through an example of where this kind of approach has been used by you and on the team.

Abhishek Joshi

So, we do order management for a leading global software provider, based out of Israel.

And when they approached us, the client was constrained by an environment of fragmented decision-making, decentralized operations, customer master data inaccuracies and sluggish order processing.

They had ServiceNow, but they were only using that as a workflow solution.

They had never thought of actually going and exploiting ServiceNow as an order management and a customer collaboration platform. Our solution was focused on the main themes, standardization first, a centralization of the order management processes through digitization and process improvements.

We started with the transformation strategy, where we went ahead and did the digital maturity assessment of the client, understood what is their technology landscape, whether it's the ERP solution, whether it's the downstream solutions or any code management system that they have.

We understood that clearly.

We understood how ServiceNow could readily be brought in and integrated with these different platforms that already exist.

We brought in OMTRAC to automate order receipt entry and line level configuration.

Generative AI was used to create standard forms and metadata standardization.

This definitely helped the client in multiple ways.

We could achieve 30% productivity gains, a 40% reduction in end-to-end cycle time, a 16% improvement in order management timeliness and a 23% increase in first time right orders.

What worked for the client, Paul, is definitely the advent of the ServiceNow solution helped them to scale up real quick.

They would earlier take a lot of time in steps like order line level configuration, which was a complex step in itself.

But with the ServiceNow coming in, a large part of that could be automated.

Because we could completely do away with any manual interventions, we were largely able to bring sufficient productivity gains, but at the same time improve a lot on time order processing as well as order accuracy or perfect order index.

Now, this is absolutely a success story for us, that we had WNS reckon with, and this is something that we intend to take to other clients as well.

Paul Morrison

That's great.

Now, I can see why you're highlighting this case.

It's really interesting, a good one.

I mean, the examples of the outcomes you gave around productivity, cycle time and so on, are super important.

I think what's obvious as well, what's exciting about this sort of enablement that happens through technology is you're also impacting some of the biggest business drivers as well.

So, you are unlocking a reduction in costs, cost per sales order, which is the big number and increasing the profitability of the business.

And I guess most importantly, you're enabling the business to grow and to scale as well.

So, all of this contributes to that.

So, it's definitely a great set of outcomes.

So, if that's a sort of case study, looking forward, where is this heading now?

What's going to be happening in the next couple of years in this space for you?

Abhishek Joshi

Yeah, I think we've barely scratched the surface while we have OMTRAC now, which is the order management solution.

But some of the themes that we want to actually explore through this platform include enhancing the touchless environment, largely getting driven through the agentic AI, developing OMTRAC as a customer collaboration platform, including workflows for forecast collaboration, order visibility, VMI visibility and tracking and invoicing and payment related issues.

We don't want to just restrict OMTRAC as an order management platform.

It's a customer collaboration platform.

So, any forecast that's being shared by the customers should readily be reflecting there. Rather than doing this over in e-mail, the collaboration can actually happen via OMTRAC directly, especially for customers where we have a VMI sort of an arrangement.

We can always look at developing the platform further to enhance that sort of a model, where the vendor managed inventory model can work out. Any invoicing, payment related issues can be addressed directly through OMTRAC workflow, real time visibility to care data points, forecast inventory order scheduling, ship dates, all that can be made visible in OMTRAC.

So, rather than you, rather than the agents or the customer going back to the ERP and checking anything, I think everything in terms of data points can be made visible in the OMTRAC solution.

And that is where we truly want to take OMTRAC to today.

Paul Morrison

That's great.

So, there's touchless, there's real time and there's customer collaboration. There's improved visibility as a result.

So, it's quite a lot of stuff going on there to look out for.

So, you're going to be busy in the next 12 months.

Abhishek Joshi

Yeah, absolutely.

A lot of things up on the sleeve, lots of ideas with that we're trying to put to reality.

Paul Morrison

That's great.

That's brilliant.

Well, Abhishek, we have to end there.

I really appreciate you running us through order management from your perspective, and they're on track and how we're working in this space.

Really appreciate you taking time to talk with us.

But, we'll end there and just say to our listeners, thank you for joining.

You can download our order management research on wns.com.

Some of the work and the research that Abhishek has been working on.

If you visit the website and search for ‘Order Management Reimagined,’ you will find material and some of those outcomes in more detail.

And finally, thank you for listening to the Retail and Consumer Pulse today.

If you've enjoyed the show, please do like and subscribe and stay tuned for our next episode.

So, thank you and goodbye.