Automating Order Management: The Critical Role of Standardization and Teamwork

The end of one year and beginning of the next provide good opportunities to reflect on your organization’s supply chain performance. With disruptions now a routine part of the supply chain landscape and customer expectations for speed and transparency continuing to rise, improving and optimizing order management processes should be top of mind.

As organizations look to automate and digitize order management, the path forward is rarely as simple as implementing a new system. The effectiveness of these technologies depends on a solid foundation of standardized processes and strong collaboration across business functions.

Standardization and collaboration are essential prerequisites for successful order management automation. Focusing on standardization and collaboration will enable you to realize the full benefits of order management automation, from improved accuracy and efficiency to better customer experiences.

Supply chains are focused on order management automation

According to APQC research, automation and digitization, order-to-cash (O2C), and transparency around order status were the Top 3 priorities for order management.

APQC

Automation and digitization are a top priority across numerous supply chain areas, and an important priority for order management. Customers today expect the same level of order management efficiency, consistency, transparency, and delivery speed in their business transactions as what they are used to experiencing in their personal transactions. Internally, automation also enables employees to focus less on repetitive, transactional tasks and more on strategic work that drives value for the business. Employee engagement and retention benefit when organizations provide employees with tools that make their lives easier and their work more engaging.

Automation and digitization for order management can meet these needs and deliver a more effective order management process overall. However, leading supply chain organizations know that you can’t just drop technology into an existing process environment. The top strategies to support automation and digitization include process standardization and improving collaboration and communication.

APQC

Lay the groundwork with collaboration and standardization

Collaboration is a catalyst for order management excellence

If you want a better order management process, finding the right technology should not be the first step—work to build a collaborative supply chain first. The cross-functional nature of order management as an end-to-end process makes it imperative for different parts of the business to work together.

Optimizing order management means process improvement, and process improvement requires the expertise of each area involved with the end-to-end process. If finance and supply chain aren’t talking to each other or working together, for example, it’s not only harder to improve handoffs between the two functions but also difficult to strategize, prioritize, and carry out end-to-end improvements.

Here are some best practices to build a supply chain culture that embraces collaboration, both internally and with end-to-end process stakeholders, and subsequently, improves order management:

»       Make collaboration a professional development expectation and build it into employee performance goals.

»       Set aside time for employees to collaborate.

»       Make collaboration platforms easy to use and integrate them into employee workflows.

»       Hire people with skills that foster collaboration, like critical thinking, curiosity, and emotional intelligence.

»       Enlist leaders to create messaging in support of collaboration and act as role models for collaborative behaviors.

Standardization drives seamless order management

A collaborative culture sets the stage for standardizing the order management process—a second critical step needed to take before automating and digitizing. It’s easy to see how a lack of standardization can cause problems that ripple throughout the process. For example, a lack of standardization for inventory management can impact order management by leading to supply outages, customer delays, or excess inventory. More broadly, a lack of standardization can lead to issues like:

»       Different order experiences across different channels

»       Errors and need for rework in highly manual processes

»       A lack of integration between systems and data

Standardization isn’t just about how to carry out the work involved with the process. It also includes creating common goals and objectives for the process that cut across functions and business areas. When an organization establishes common goals, departments or functions can focus on taking their performance to the next level in support of those goals. Without goals to reinforce a collaborative mindset, different functions in an enterprise or even within supply chain might be working against one another.

Standardization is a significant undertaking for an end-to-end process like order management, but at a high level it involves three steps:

»       Mapping the end-to-end process as it exists today and laying out each step in the process. Process mapping is often carried out through a series of workshops with the teams that execute the processes.

»       Looking for inconsistencies, inefficiencies, bottlenecks, or pain points in each component process (e.g., inventory management) and across the end-to-end process as a whole.

»       Designing a standardized, ideal future state process (and component processes) that align with automation.

Carry out this work in collaboration with a business process management function, or seek out people with expertise in process management. They can help you carry out activities like process mapping and standardization in ways that align with best practices.

Build momentum for order management automation in 2026 and beyond

Supply chain leaders are right to prioritize collaboration and standardization to support order management automation. Process standardization is not only a critical prerequisite for effective automation, but it often delivers its own benefits even before technology is introduced by making processes more efficient and effective. Standardizing can drive better cycle times and better performance overall.

However, you can’t standardize across silos. Collaboration, both within order management and alongside end-to-end process stakeholders, is vital for getting visibility into each component process and for workshopping improvements across the end-to-end process.

Simply put, the journey to order management automation and digitization begins with people and processes. Invest in both, and the technology will deliver lasting value.