Did you know that 80% of business printing is related to transactions? This means invoices, purchase orders, delivery notes, and even payment confirmations. And yet most of these materials are originally created electronically. This virtually systematic shift to paper requires an investment of time and money that companies don’t necessarily need to make. It’s such a waste of time and money to end up printing them!

So there are a number of critical steps in the process for delivery notes, apart from the delivery per se (receipt and signing by the customer, data entry, comparison with the purchase order, confirmation, etc.). And using paper just slows these vital steps down.

What if you could speed up many of the time-consuming tasks related to delivery notes?

Normally, a paper delivery slip has to be handled by several people before being saved in a system. Every day, owing to errors during data entry or the loss of paper delivery slips, many companies are unable to invoice or receive payment from their customers. Sometimes, when it can’t be proven that a delivery was made, the company even has to deliver the product a second time.

So what can be done to improve the situation and bring speed and accuracy to your proof of delivery process?

The power of automation

The Aberdeen Group notes that 62% of businesses providing delivery service want to improve information sharing between the delivery person and the billing office.

On the other hand, it has found that 60% of companies are still not using automation software. Is your company one of them?

Collecting information is not an end in itself; organizations also need to be able to process the information quickly. Documents can get lost or damaged during the many steps (by the person in charge of delivering, customer service, or even during the scanning process).

The time it takes to go from one step to the next (e.g. completing a document to digitizing it) adds to the inefficiency. By automating the delivery tasks, you can shorten the time, minimize errors and limit inaction between each of the steps.

Therefore, it’s vital to automate the information-collection step, but it shouldn’t be the only step you optimize.

Imagine being able to automatically send a delivery confirmation and invoice to your customers by email right after delivery and, at the same time, send a copy to the customer service department and update the information in the CRM.

Use the full potential of digital technology

To facilitate automation, digitizing your processes is still of obvious benefit.

When the delivery person can keep all of the day’s notes on a tablet, easily get the customer to sign (without any paper involved), and send the signed note to the office at a click, it becomes much easier for an organization to automate the next steps, such as billing.

But digitizing your delivery process is not enough. You’ll want to harness the full potential of technology.

The Aberdeen Group has found that fewer than 36% of companies can add visual or interactive content to the transactional data they collect in the field. It’s good to get rid of paper. But it’s even better to take that opportunity to increase the level of detail and accuracy associated with the delivery! For example, if a parcel gets damaged, the delivery person can take a picture of the damage and directly add information to the customer’s file in real time.

Integration with your billing systems

Since the entire purchase process relies on data from a number of sources, being able to link data from an ERP or CRM system—or even the accounting department—to the data gathered in the field, helps to provide better service to customers and guarantees greater productivity among all your employees (and not just those in the field).

What’s more, when it comes time to choose a solution, you’ll want to evaluate its potential for automation and integration with systems and data, its flexibility, and whether it can do more than just data entry through digital forms.

You’re probably thinking that this type of solution is only designed for companies with deep pockets. Think again—and take a look at our services!