Benefits of Lean order practices

Lean Order practices yield benefits in four key business metrics - Cycle Time, Quality, Productivity, and Profit Margin:

Cycle Time: Customers have found that by effectively streamlining their business
processes, their end-to-end quote and order processing cycle times are typically improved by 50% - 90% over the existing practices. Reducing cycle time by these amounts provides the opportunity to effectively double throughput—and more importantly, in many cases, to lead markets in responsiveness to customer needs.

Quality: Outmoded, manual quote and order processes are typically error-prone from initial quote throughout the production cycle. By adopting Lean commerce practices customers typically reduce errors by 95%, and many achieve error rates of less than 1% by implementing bulletproof processes in pricing, sales ordering, feature/option selection, proposal and contract development, collateral creation, and engineering.

Productivity: Proper business process design, supplemented with functional automation and restructured data, will yield productivity improvements in excess of 50% over cumbersome and disjointed practices typically found in CTO/ETO operations. This productivity can translate directly to headcount reductions, or redeployment of key staff to higher impact tasks/responsibilities. Additionally, by removing many of the cumbersome, manual, and redundant sales tasks, sales force effectiveness and morale can be greatly improved, translating to increased sales effectiveness.

Profit Margin: Once the error rates are reduced and processes are streamlined, customers often realize between two and five points of margin gain through the elimination of mistakes, error/rework costs and overlapping/redundant handling, processing and expediting.