The Orchestrator use cases we see at ACBM are always about making things simpler and faster for internal teams. Speeding up internal business processes saves a remarkable amount of time and effort. What does this mean for your customers?
One of our clients found a way to directly deliver on customer expectations by targeting a particular use case. We interviewed Gerald Brendle, Director of Innovation and Strategic Projects, about how one small orchestration made a big difference in maintaining an outstanding customer experience.
A Science Supply Company for the Modern Classroom
Carolina Biological Supply Company is a provider of science products and resources for classrooms across the U.S. Gerald talked about what makes his company stand out. “Customer service and exceptional value have earned us a strong reputation in the market. We have an unconditional guarantee on all our branded products. We also want to make it as easy as possible for customers to get what they need.”
Distance learning educators make up a big part of Carolina Biological’s customer base. They need kits shipped directly to students’ homes for use in online classes. A single order might include 800-1500 different items. These orders arrived in Excel format and had to be individually copied and pasted into JDE for fulfillment. Besides being tedious and error prone, this process posed a couple of thorny challenges in terms of keeping customers happy.
Racing the Clock to Meet Expectations
- The expected turnaround time to get orders shipped was just two days. Getting that many orders submitted took eight team members keying everything in by hand to get it done. Failure to hit the deadline would mean shipment delays and disappointed customers. It took the team heroic efforts just to meet the promised shipping times.
Watching Other Areas of Customer Service Suffer
- With eight people working at top speed, it still took a total of 20 hours to enter just 500 sales orders. Getting the orders done in time often meant pulling customer service reps from the call center. If call volume was heavy, this meant a bigger backlog and longer hold times for customers.
An Ideal Use Case for JDE Orchestrator Business Process Automation
The obvious solution had to involve automating sales order entry...without breaking the bank. According to Gerald, “JDE is a fantastic database, but it can be time consuming from the entry standpoint. We looked into building a custom application to help with order entry. However, that would have been quite expensive. We decided to use the Orchestrator instead since it was already included for free.”
That just left the issue of exactly HOW to use the Orchestrator to get the data from Excel into the JDE. That’s where Gerald and his team decided to find out more about using the Orchestrator. During their training with ACBM, they learned about the ADEX tool and everything fell into place. After creating the orchestration with ADEX, they took it for a test drive--and found that it cut SO entry time by 90%.
“ADEX is the easiest way to feed data to our orchestration directly from the familiar Excel environment. Order entry that used to take 20 hours for a whole team now takes one CSR a couple of hours. We didn’t have to get our IT developers involved at all to create or deploy what we needed.”
Will This Solution be Sustainable over Time?
Scalability and reliability are two factors that make the ADEX solution particularly attractive. With this orchestration running, it will be easier to keep up with demand for products no matter how much Carolina Biological’s customer base grows. Plus, Gerald won’t have to worry about the orchestration breaking every time the JDE goes through an upgrade.
“We wanted something standard, out of the box. All ADEX does is it translates Excel into JSON and calls that orchestration. It was about the simplest, easiest thing to do to minimize the need to build a custom application. Our orchestration is pure JDE. It upgrades flawlessly along with the JDE because there’s no custom code or retrofitting.”
Gerald and his team have hit the ground running with the Orchestrator and ADEX, and are continuing to find new ways to make their business more efficient.
What Can You Automate to Keep Your Customers Happy?
Customers often don’t realize how much effort it takes to give them the experience they expect and deserve. By using ADEX, a simple orchestration can work behind the scenes to let your team deliver faster, more responsive service.
What do you have in mind to make things easier for your staff and better for your customers? Talk to us about your idea, or let’s find use cases together.
