Order-to-Cash Process in UiPath Process Mining

Introduction

Order-to-Cash is the set of business processes from receiving and processing customer sales orders for goods and services to payment. The Order-to-Cash process starts from the Order and completes at Payment received from the customer. The most important artifacts of the Order-to-Cash process are sales orders, goods delivery, billing and payment.

Steps in the Order to Cash process

There are several variants of the Order-to-Cash process. The SAP Order-to-Cash Connector for AppOne in UiPath Process Mining is based on the Sales from Stock variant. This is the most standard variant of the main process that consists of the following steps. This thus excludes the process where goods first need to be ordered or manufactured.

Step 1: Sales Order

The process begins with the system receiving an order from the customer. This can be done via different ways, for example, email, a webshop, a sales person, or by some form of Electronic Data Interchange. An order can be a simple purchase request for one particular product or can contain different products and quantities.

Step 2: Delivery

The order is documented, and the company begins the task of fulfilling the order, which means the order is prepared for shipment to the customer. Afterwards the order is shipped to the customer.

Step 3: Invoicing

Once the product has been shipped and delivered, the most important stage of the cycle begins with regard to cash management. The invoice is created and sent to the customer for payment.

Step 4: Accounting

The customer pays for the invoice and the payment is logged in your accounting books as part of the accounts receivable against the raised order.

Subprocesses

Next to the main Sales from Stock process, subprocesses can be identified that involve additional activities. For example the following subprocesses are available in the SAP Order-to-Cash Connector for AppOne in UiPath Process Mining:

Credit memo

If the price calculated for the customer was too high a credit memo request is created. This may happen due to, for example, prices are incorrectly scaled or because a discount was forgotten. When the credit memo request is approved, a credit memo starts a billing process and reduced the amounts receivable from a customer.

Return

When the customer wants to send delivered goods back to your company, for example due to a complaint, a corresponding returns document can be created to reproduce the process in the system.

Down payment

If a customer ordered some goods from your company and you are not sure about the customer's commitment, you can request a payment advance from the customer by issuing a down payment request. The rest of the amount will be paid after the goods are delivered.

Process insights

The above process describes an ideal scenario in which the customer gets the product or service and the company gets paid in time. However, in many cases there will be differences and deviations to this.

A significant portion of the operating costs within a company is spent in managing the Order-to-Cash process. The greater the inefficiencies in the process, the greater the risk of a negative impact on the business’s cash inflow. Managing a consistent Order-to-Cash process provides a reliable and healthy company.

Order-to-Cash activities impact operations throughout the organization such as inventory management and supply chain management. Optimizing the Order-to-Cash process eliminates inefficiencies and can lead to benefits throughout the entire organization.

With UiPath Process Mining you get more insight in the actual execution of the Order-to-Cash process, and detailed information to analyze the statuses of orders, deliveries, invoices and payments.

Monitoring the Order to Cash process in AppOne

With UiPath Process Mining, you get insight in how your Order-to-Cash process actually performs. For example on delivery times or payment times.

With AppOne you can easily monitor your Order-to-Cash process to check the progress and quality of the process on a regular basis. If deviations are detected, you can take action to improve or change the process or parts of the process. In AppOne, default KPI’s and Tags are defined, which enable you to keep an overview of the process.

With KPI’s (Key Performance Indicators) you can measure for example:

• The complete order to cash cycle time;
• Number of days between shipment or service and billing;
• The on-time delivery percentage;
• The average payment period;
• Percentage of billing errors;
• Percentage of automated invoices.

Tags are properties that are important for the Order-to-Cash process and help you to monitor the performance. Tags can indicate inefficiencies like rework, but also violations of your policies or SLA. There are several default Tags defined for the Order-to-Cash process in the SAP Order-to-Cash Connector for AppOne.