Conexiom Blog

Addressing Driving Forces of the New Automation Imperative

Written by Pierce Smith | November 18, 2020

Driving forces like COVID-19 and corporate governance have encouraged companies to accelerate digital transformation through automation. With how the world is evolving, companies face an urgent need to improve productivity, enhance customer experience, and utilize the resources of their businesses.  

Mark Toffoli, VP and global leader solutions engineering at Conexiomdiscusses the key drivers of digital transformation and automation in the webinar Accelerating Digital Transformation,” hosted by CXOonline 

 

Disruption Reminds Us of the Importance of Building Business Resiliency 

Wholesale distributors and manufacturers today are accelerating digital transformation due to environmental forces like COVID-19. In a world of supply chain disruptions, companies simply cannot afford to risk service execution failures and lose customers 

Toffoli is often asked by companies how they can count on the same amount of revenue, win customers, and take advantage of competitors in a struggling market.

Toffoli’s solution to these challenges is automation. Specifically, touchless sales order automation software. It transforms how businesses transact with their customers so they can meet disruption and adapt. Successful businesses build resiliency, working to streamline and automate operations to get their businesses future ready. Sales order automation is key to capturing market share from competitors, delivering more value to customers, and ensuring repeat business.

“Touchless automation is the real key,” said Toffoli. “Using AI and machine learning, we can help our customers get to more than 80% touchless automations.”

 As an example, Mark noted that Grainger, a leading B2B distributor with more than 1.2 million products and 2 million customers, has achieved 84% touchless automation with Conexiom 

84% of the time, when a customer emails Grainger an order, it passes through our service into their system automatically out to the warehouse. Nobody has to touch it, and it does it in fewer than 5 minutes.”  

 

Prioritizing Automation to Optimize Resources and Customer Experience 

Sales order automation not only adds business resiliency, but it also enhances the customer experience, improves productivity, and optimizes resources 

 “Five years ago, it wasn’t uncommon for manufacturers to get orders into their system 1-2 days from when they received them, said Toffoli. Today, you wouldn’t hear someone say it takes any more than 1-2 hours from when they received them. Time compression has become so important. It means companies need a way to scale and consume the spikes in demand without causing a negative customer experience. 

From a corporate governance perspective, the secret to achieving digital transformation is deciding sales order automation is a priority that’s worth the investment. Toffoli recognized that “modern companies that are succeeding are ones that realize they need to align stakeholders in the organization around the change (sales order automation) they’re trying to affect. The entire organization needs to be alignedso they can advance things quickly. 

What we mostly see is there’s a pent-up need to do more than the business can do today,” continued Toffoli. Everyone has too much on their plate. How do you relieve what’s on their plate so you can release the capacity of those resources to do more? 

By focusing on accelerating your digital transformation by implementing sales order automation, you gain instant ROI, such as business resiliency, better customer experience, and improved productivity 

Watch the on-demand webinar in its entirety.