Thank you all for your participation in our supplier poll! Although the poll continues to get votes, the results are pretty clear.
- FAX-28%
- E-MAIL-59%
- WEB PORTAL-13%
Not surprisingly, many of the sales people who service our accounts from the road would prefer to receive our orders via e-mail. That said, most of the volume flowing through our program is typically processed either through our electronic connection EDI, or through our Web Portal.
Here’s what we think…
- BEST: EDI; This is old language but basically Electronic Data Interface does exactly what you would think. It links our systems together and provides the most efficient process for ordering, confirmations and even exceptions.
- BEST: WEB PORTAL; Print and Re-Print option, quick confirmation and daily summary at a glance.
- OK: E-MAIL; No confirmation option (at this time), no summary (at this time) and some orders get caught in spam filters.
- NOT SO GOOD: FAXING; not dependable, no confirmation option, no summary (at this time).
Although it is our long term goal to expand services to our suppliers through our Vendor Portal, including messaging, price update options and order analytics, we realize the need for a better model for the e-mail systems especially for those of your retrieving our orders from the road.
Partly as a result of this poll we will be working on those features.
Confirmations are a very important part of our process. It’s so important in fact that we have created an alert system which automatically notifies customers when the orders are confirmed. The sooner you confirm the order within our system, the sooner the customer receives confirmation of that order. It builds trust in the relationship and provides our customers with piece of mind.
We were somewhat surprised to see as many people vote for the fax orders, although it makes sense for those suppliers who may be less technical. Many companies, who don’t have regular access to e-mail or even the web, often opt for this option. Here at ChefMod, we generally discourage faxing as it is often less reliable than e-mail or the web portal. It also doesn’t provide any accountability since many people may be responsible for the order without any ONE person being responsible for it. Clearly there is no credible confirmation that the order was received.
Again, thank you all for participating and please if you ever have an idea how to make our program better, please do not hesitate to contact us. You can continue to comment on this blog or you may also contact me directly at john@chefmod.com
- 09:40 Thanks to all of our suppliers for participating in our poll. Take a look…tinyurl.com/n2td8x #
- 17:59 Every once in a while we find something interesting on the web relative to what we do. Check out “10 ways to… bit.ly/17dieJ #
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