Quote to cash
Your orders take too long to turn into cash.
We follow the dollar end to end, quote to cash. Where does the order stop moving? Who keys it in a second time? Which step adds a day and no value? Then we take those steps out. A cleaner process is faster and costs less to run.
Does this sound like your business?
Each step belongs to somebody. The space between the steps belongs to nobody, which is where the days go.
- The quote waits on one person, and custom work waits longer.
- The order gets keyed in twice, and the two copies disagree.
- Somebody walks a paper copy out to the floor.
- Nobody can say where an order is without asking three people.
- The invoice goes out days after the truck did.
What the work involves
We follow the process, not the org chart, and we talk to the people doing the work.
Follow a real order
Quote to cash, through the office and the plant floor, with the people who touch it. Not a workshop about how it’s supposed to work.
Mark every stop and every re-key
Where it waits, who enters it again, and which step adds a day and no value. Written down, the pattern is usually obvious.
Get the knowledge out of people’s heads
Build details that live on paper cards or in memory are why custom orders wait. In a usable form, they stop being a bottleneck.
Take the steps out
Sometimes that’s a system change, sometimes a process change, sometimes a tool you already pay for. We tell you which.
Questions about quote to cash
What is quote to cash?
Quote to cash is everything between a customer asking for a price and the money arriving: quoting, the order, scheduling, building or picking it, shipping, invoicing and collection. It crosses sales, operations, the floor and accounting, which is why no single department can fix it alone.
Why does our quoting take so long?
Usually because the information needed to price the job lives in one person’s head or on paper, so every custom quote waits on whoever remembers. The fix is getting those build details and costs into a form anyone can use, rather than asking the business to hire another expert.
How do I find the bottleneck in our order process?
Follow one real order end to end and mark every point where it stops moving, gets keyed in a second time, or waits on a person. The bottleneck moves around, which is why it never gets fixed. Written down, the pattern is usually obvious within a week.
Do we need new software to fix this?
Often no. Sometimes the answer is a process change rather than software, and sometimes it’s a tool you already pay for. We say so when that’s the case. Buying software to cover a process nobody has agreed on usually makes the problem more expensive, not smaller.
Tell us where the order gets stuck.
A couple of sentences is plenty. We’ll tell you honestly whether we’re the right people to help.