Naimish Patel

Print orders were typically received via phone call, fax, or direct mail before the advent of modern order management software. Following the receipt of an order, the previous order management processing required the manual work of checking multiple levels before finalizing and delivering an order.

These manual processes do not work in today’s e-commerce landscape. Customers anticipate a quick response, real-time order status updates, order processing through dozens of sales channels, and a real web-to-print solution.

Technological advancement has raised the customers’ expectations. Fortunately, technology can also be used to streamline your entire multichannel order management process and keep customers coming back.

What is an Order Management System?

In the printing industry, order management software is a solution that organizes multichannel orders into manageable tasks and aids in the smooth operation of your e-commerce order fulfillment process. It simplifies and automates ordering and reordering processes from Estimation to shipping. An Order Management Software also helps reduce workforce, cost, and time needed to process orders.

Why should you consider an order management system?

We were hoping you could invest your valuable time and energy in other aspects of your business rather than banging your head around multiple spreadsheets. Managing an order cycle from beginning to end is challenging without a proper automated system. Some of the critical pain-area of working order could be these:

• Synchronization of the multiple channels: You really can’t force your customers to use one single medium to place an order. They’ll use the medium at their convenience, email, in-person, or anything else. Now, it’s a challenging and tedious job to gather that information from different channels and turn it into a lead properly. There’s a high chance of missing communication and information. An Order Management Software helps to gather data from multiple channels and smoothen the order processing system.
• Confusion in Pre-production Process: After the lead generation, the next most important step is to finalize the deal and lock the price with the parties’ approval. Now at this step, manual quote generation by considering every aspect and being updated with every communication back and forth with clients can be tricky. An Order Management Software helps ease the pre-production process with an automatic quote and invoice generation system. Statistically speaking, if you can quote a price within 5 minutes with an automated system instead of 30 minutes via a manual process, it can increase your chances of winning an order by 21X times.
• Low Communication: With the lack of a proper automated system, you need to do every communication manually. For example, you choose a quotation for a particular order and get approval from the customer, and you need to send an email to them. They’ll further reply to you with the acceptance or some revised request and the chain going on. So, to finalize a quote, there’ll be tons of emails, and you don’t want that! Specifically, it takes approximately 14-17 interactions to confirm a print order that may cost around 160-320USD. On the other hand, an order management e-commerce system can automatically send notifications via multiple channels whenever there’s an update, lowering your cost. It can also reduce staffing from 6 to 2 people.
• Lack of Intra-Team Communication: Obviously, it takes an army to accept an order from lead to delivery. The entire system has to be divided into multiple teams responsible for different tasks. After a final deal, you need to watch the whole procedure to check its progress and flaws, and it isn’t easy to monitor everything physically every time!. To solve this problem, you need to close the connection with the production team. So there should be an internal workflow maintenance system where you can observe the production’s teamwork. A Print Production Workflow can synchronize the process internally and make the tracking easy.
• Vendor: If expanding your business is in your mind, outsourcing has to be one of the major solutions. And it’s a task to keep track of the orders, their status, and the commission reports when working with multiple vendors. An Order Management System can integrate with the Vendor Workflow and manage the orders and the other aspects.

How Can We Help?

OnPrintshop’s Order Management Software is a platform that brings solutions to all the above-stated problems on one plate.

• Simplify orders via Sales Channels: This omnichannel functionality helps your team track and manage orders from multiple channels reducing the manual effort. It also helps centrally manage all your customer databases and easy reordering for your team or the end customer, which helps increase profitability and customer retention.
• Manage Orders’ Pre-Production: Once the order is confirmed, the pre-production process takes care of generating an invoice, sending notifications on an update to different level approvals, managing assigning work, and keeping track of them.
• Manage Production Workflow: This functionality helps you integrate with the production team and understand the flow and progress of the actual work.
• Makes Order Tracking Easy: Job board to track all your orders and QR code to auto-transfer orders from one department to another.
• Manage Vendor Outsourcing: OnPrintShop’s Order Management System simplifies the outsourcing to multiple vendors. You can auto-relegate or physically allot orders, it’ll inform the merchants, and they can either utilize Vendor Admin or orders can be driven into the Vendor work process.

In the End:

For the last fourteen years, starting from 2008, we have served 1000+ clients with our diversified top-notch printing order management system. We have six, web to print solutions, from standard W2P solutions to Custom-made tailored solutions and Designer Studio Integration. So, if you want to ease your business by automating the order management system, don’t wait. Check our website now and reach out.