The roles, from the inside.

For each role: the day-to-day, the objectives, the frequent problems, how it plays out in each sector, and what gets automated without taking the decision away from the teams.

• Sales administration

  Sales administration keeps the promise made to the customer: entering the order, confirming it, tracking its delivery and settling discrepancies. It is the function most exposed to re-keying, and one of those where automation shows the fastest.

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• Buyer and sourcing

  The buyer owns the full cost of what the company sells or consumes, and the strength of the supplier panel behind it. It is a job of documents and chasers (quotes, certificates, confirmations, invoices), where automation quickly frees up time for negotiation and sourcing.

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• Replenishment and supply chain

  Replenishment holds the company’s product availability and stock levels, between what sales plans to sell and what suppliers can deliver. It is a job of repeated calculations, follow-ups and trade-offs on data scattered across the ERP, warehouses and tracking files: time freed from data collection goes straight back into anticipation.

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• Management control

  Management control holds the company’s economic reading: budget, reforecast, margins, cost prices and the management reporting on which the executive committee makes its calls. A large part of the job is collecting, reconciling and adjusting data from the ERP, payroll and many files: that is where automation shows first.

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• Accounts payable

  Accounts payable manages the company’s debt to its suppliers: every invoice received, checked, booked and then paid on the right date, with no duplicates and no wrong payee. It is a continuous flow of documents to read, match and chase, which makes it one of the areas where automation shows its value earliest.

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• Customer service

  Customer service keeps the promise made at the moment of purchase: it answers, reassures, resolves and reports back what customers say about the offer, the delivery and the product. It is one of the functions where automation shows fastest, because a large share of requests concern information already held in the ERP, the order system or carrier tracking.

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