Infosys-Oracle Blog

During a process improvement discussion on 'Voice of Customer' meet, one of the sales managers said, "Order processing in systems is the biggest bottleneck in our sales cycle. Further you simplify, more you will get it". The meet was part of large scale transformation endeavor, instigated with a new product launch for a legal media publishing company.

How true it is for a sale representative! Continuously bombarded with new products, company's acquisitions resulting in desperate order entry applications and compensation linked with products cross sell. Why only for sales? Even for call center reps doing order entry while on call, and for consumers doing order entry through self service channels.   

Let us take a quick look at online products; typically online products are sold as part of Menus. For legal publishing, these Menus consist of information published from content sources. The content provider publishes varied information like Cases, News, Public Records, and Court Filings etc.

Now let us look at some facts which make these offerings complex;

• Within last 10 years, number of menus has increased to 1400 %**
• Individual source can appear in any number of Menus
• Each Menu has a different price point 
                                                          (**Data - leading legal solution provider in US)

Typical characteristics of legal publishing enforce designers to think laterally for this industry where business models are getting transformed from "Service Providers" to "Solution Providers".

While it is true that legal industry dynamics and product structure contributes to Order entry complexities. But majority of complications are also due to 'People's involvement & training', 'Holistic Process definition' and 'Right use of technology & tools'. While there are enormous discussion opportunities on these subjects, I would limit the scope by illustrating on order processes.

In legal publishing, the order function revolves around following high level processes; 

• Proposal & Contract: Proposing different offers and finalizing on one, subsequently formulating a contract with approvals, legal terms editions etc. 

• Order Capture & Validations: Entering the order details and subscribers data along with system checks on data validations like emails, subscription period etc.   

• Security & Verification: Validation of subscribers, company and contact information for background check and future communications. 

• Billing Provisioning: Sending order information to billing application and setting up the billing cycles, account and subscription information.  

• Order Fulfillment & On-boarding: Running the subscriber information against authentication, generating and sending the user id password information.

• Subscription Management: Different operations on a subscription e.g. extend, inactivate, reactivate, terminate, interrupt, resume etc. with different level of validations and authorization.

The problem statement becomes more complicated while leveraging the alignment of "Order-to-Cash" with "Campaign-to-Order", "Cash-to-Care", "Billing & Invoicing" & "Royalty" processes. What make it worst is the inconsistencies in order  processing rules across different segments like Small Law Firms, Mid-Size & Large Law Firms, Law Schools, Law Students, Corporate & Non-Profit Firms and Government clients. 

Different leading software vendors have been collaborating with publishing leaders to enrich their application platform. Infosys team has been working with a US client to create a seamless solution on Oracle platform. We successfully completed the first milestone where the Order Management functions are configured on Siebel platform with an end-to-end integration with Billing (BRM), Finance (PeopleSoft), Fulfillment (WAM) and other back office applications. 

I'd be interested in hearing about your experiences and opinions for handling complex order management function on typical enterprise software packages. Also if you are facing similar challenges, I will be very happy to share more details. Please feel free to write back.