Kanban / Pipeline is a popular workflow management method which helps visualize, control and improve processes to limit work in progress. Each card represents a single work item as it moves through various stages of completion.
We noticed that these principles are applicable and beneficial for fulfillment process:
- Each Sales Orders comes in New and ends up Closed while going through all fulfillment and payment statuses
- Most often you are expected to ship and then capture payment, so that’s a straightforward workflow to visualize
- You can easily focus on that part of job that’s piling up, e.g. too many New orders not ordered yet; payments not processed for Shipped orders; remind vendors of remaining quantities for Partially Shipped orders, etc.
So here you go – we’ve added such functionality to QuickSales and prepared some ready boards for you to use.
It might look complicated, but it’s actually not that different from the basic example above.
Order Pipeline
Each column is basically an individual Sales Orders page with its own individual filters – idea is that all orders are visible at single page and you can see where you are at. Order Pipeline sorts Sales Orders by fulfillment status till Shipped, then checks for payment status till Paid & Closed, and if you process orders as expected by GSA related cards will all end up in the far-right column.
If something goes wrong (still no package list from vendor; failed payment) – order will remain in corresponding column so that you can notice and take corrective actions. Just click on the entity number and system will open it in separate tab.
Later we’ll add more interactive elements to this page so that you can start Batch PO / Batch Payment from this page, ship orders manually, send emails, etc.
PO Pipeline
Similar logic is used for PO Pipeline – it can help locate Submitted POs that were not shipped yet, or Shipped POs that were not Billed yet. If you have any active fulfillment modules, you can add EDI Problem POs column here to review them in time.
Custom boards for Focus Assist / Urgent Work
You can create new boards of your own and share with other users under your account – you can configure Quote / Invoice Pipelines that can work similar to Order / PO Pipelines. Please let us know if you notice any issues or need assistance.
Or, you can simply add hot lists of problem entities / pain points like Shipped Orders with CC Problem / Quotes that were not converted to Sales Orders yet. Entities will show up in these columns when they obtain statuses that you configured for that column, and will disappear when status is changed to something else.
Please let us know if any issues – we can add specific filters or new sorting options to support your use case.