Solution Brief: Optimize Order-toCash Operations with DemandLine: Automate, Align, and Accelerate

DemandLine streamlines order-to-cash operations by automating customer communication, providing real-time demand insights, and proactively resolving issues. By aligning customer requirements with production plans, it boosts efficiency, reduces costs, and strengthens customer relationships across the supply chain.

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Boost Efficiency, Enhance Visibility, and Strengthen Customer Collaboration

Effective customer collaboration is essential to streamlining order-to-cash operations, but manual processes, communication gaps, and misaligned schedules often hinder progress. This
solution brief outlines how DemandLine simplifies customer management through automated data exchange, realtime insights, and proactive issue resolution. By centralizing customer collaboration and improving operational efficiency, DemandLine helps businesses optimize performance, reduce delays, and enhance customer relationships.

• 83% of companies have experienced raw materials shortages over the past year (McKinsey & Company, 2023).
• 68% of procurement leaders cite supply chain disruptionsas their top concern (Deloitte CPO Survey, 2023).

THE CHALLENGE

The Challenge: Addressing Supply Chain Challenges

Order-to-cash inefficiencies often stem from managing complex customer interactions:

• Manual, Error-Prone Processes: Repetitive administrative tasks increase errors and consume valuable time.
• Misaligned Schedules: Gaps between customer requirements and your production plans lead to costly bottlenecks.
• Lack of Visibility: Limited real-time insights into customer requirements hinder effective decision-making.
• Reactive Problem Resolution: Addressing issues after they disrupt operations increases risks and costs.

HOW DEMANDLINE SOLVES SUPPLY CHAIN CHALLENGES:

Automated Workflows, RealTime Insights, and Proactive Issue Resolution

DemandLine addresses these challenges with a secure platform that automates customer interactions, reduces manual work, and improves visibility.

• Two-Way Data Exchange: Automates customer demand schedules, communication of your production plans, and ASNs to keep customer requirements aligned with your ERP system.
• Real-Time Insights: Tracks customer demand changes to ensure conformance to your contracts and alignment with your production.
• Change Analysis and Exception Reporting: Identifies discrepancies and provides actionable alerts to mitigate risks.
• Custom Reporting: Generates tailored insights into customer demand changes and your inventory/production that may be at risk.

Why DemandLine? Transform Customer Collaboration with These Benefits

Automate Customer Communication: Reduce administrative overhead by automating critical workflows like customer requirements, communication of your production plans, and ASNs, ensuring accurate and timely communication.

• Gain Visibility into Customer Performance: Monitor real-time data on customer demand schedules, enabling better alignment and proactive decision-making.
• Proactively Address Issues: Receive alerts on missing contracts, missing parts, and other exceptions, allowing you to resolve issues before they impact operations.
• Improve Efficiency and Reduce Costs: Streamlined workflows minimize manual work and errors, freeing up resources to focus on strategic initiatives.
• Ensure Data Consistency: DemandLine normalizes customer data, ensuring compatibility with your ERP and maintaining consistency across your operations.

USE CASES

How DemandLine Enhances Business Performance

DemandLine transforms customer collaboration by eliminating manual processes, reducing inefficiencies, and improving realtime visibility into customer demand. By automating order entry, customer service workflows, production planning, and shipping, businesses achieve greater alignment between customer requirements and internal operations. This leads to faster response times, fewer errors, and improved customer satisfaction.

How DemandLine Solves Common Challenges

Order Entry Automation: Ensuring Accuracy & Reducing Manual Work

• Before DemandLine: Teams manually compare customer purchase orders (POs), update order books, and reconcile data across spreadsheets and ERP systems, and multiple customer specific supplier portals—leading to delays and costly errors.
• After DemandLine: DemandLine automatically retrieves POs and updates your ERP daily, ensuring real-time alignment with customer demand and eliminating redundant administrative work. This automation enables teams to focus on customer-critical tasks rather than data entry.

Customer Service Efficiency: Enhancing Responsiveness & Proactivity

• Before DemandLine: Customer service representatives (CSRs) spend hours gathering data across systems to respond to overdue order inquiries, often struggling to provide timely updates.
• After DemandLine: DemandLine tracks and flags customerdriven demand changes inside the lead time, providing immediate visibility into schedule adjustments. CSRs receive automated alerts and reports, enabling faster responses, improved transparency, and proactive communication.

Production Planning Optimization: Aligning Demand with Capacity

• Before DemandLine: Planners manually adjust production schedules, update customer commitments once per week, and struggle to maintain synchronization with demand fluctuations.
• After DemandLine: DemandLine automatically updates commitments based on inventory and production schedules, ensuring continuous alignment between customer orders and internal capacity. This eliminates the need for planners to log into multiple portals and improves forecasting accuracy.

Shipping Process Automation: Accelerating Fulfillment & Eliminating Errors

• Before DemandLine: Shipping teams manually determine shipment eligibility, generate ASNs, and print barcode labels—resulting in slow fulfillment
  cycles and increased risk of shipment errors.
• After DemandLine: DemandLine automates ASN creation and barcode printing, reducing manual intervention and accelerating shipping processes. The system ensures
  shipment eligibility is verified in real-time, allowing for faster order fulfillment and reduced delays.

Impact & Business Outcomes

• Faster Order Processing: Eliminates manual PO reconciliation, reducing administrative workload.
• Proactive Issue Resolution: Tracks demand changes and flags misalignments before they cause disruptions.
• Seamless ERP Integration: Keeps data synchronized across customer portals and internal systems.
• Reduced Operational Costs: Streamlined workflows save businesses up to $800,800 per site annually.
• Improved Customer Satisfaction: Ensures timely communication, accurate fulfillment, and fewer delays.

DemandLine empowers businesses to move from reactive issue resolution to proactive, data-driven decisionmaking, creating stronger customer relationships and a more resilient, efficient supply chain.

PROOF POINTS

Success Stories: Real Businesses, Real Results

• Labor Cost Reduction & Efficiency Gains: Saves businesses $100K–$800K per site annually, reducing order processing time from hours to seconds and cutting manual workloads by up to 70%.
• Proactive Issue Resolution & Supply Chain Visibility: Tracks customer demand changes in real-time, reducing late shipments by 30% and improving data accuracy to 99%+.
• Seamless ERP Integration & Faster Fulfillment:Syncs with 20+ ERP systems, automates ASNs andbarcode creation, cutting shipment processing timeby 50% and improving fulfillment accuracy to 95%
• Deployment: Can be hosted or can operate behind your firewall for enhanced control and security.
• ERP Compatibility: Supports integration with all major ERP systems, with custom options available.
• Custom Reporting: Tailored insights to match your specific needs.

PRICING

Pricing & Deployment: Scalable Options for Every Business

DemandLine offers flexible pricing options to fit your supply chain needs, whether you require a standard integration or a customized enterprise solution.

• Subscription-based pricing available for businesses of all sizes.
• Custom enterprise packages for complex supply chain networks.

Contact us for a quote at exostar.com/demandline

FAQS

Everything You Need to Know About DemandLine

How does DemandLine automate customer interactions?

Answer: DemandLine automates critical customer-facing workflows such as demand schedules, sending production
plans, and advanced shipment notifications (ASNs). It ensures that customer requirements are accurately reflected in your ERP system, reducing manual work and improving efficiency. DemandLine also creates ASNs to your customers based on your packing list activity.

Can DemandLine integrate with my existing ERP system?

Answer: Yes, DemandLine is designed to integrate seamlessly with all major ERP systems. If your ERP is not pre-integrated, we create an integration and provide
support to complete the integration efficiently.

How does DemandLine ensure data accuracy between customers and my operations?

Answer: DemandLine normalizes data from customers, ensuring consistency across all systems. It processes customer data using best-practice logic tailored to your ERP, reducing errors and helping you maintain alignment with your production plans.

What types of notifications does DemandLine provide?

Answer: DemandLine sends automated notifications for critical events, such as contracts that aren’t in your ERP, parts that aren’t in your ERP, and errors in data exchange. Notifications can be customized by user and event type to ensure the right stakeholders are informed.

Is DemandLine secure?

Answer: Absolutely. Whether we host DemandLine or you install it behind your firewall, your data remains under your control. It employs advanced encryption and access
controls to protect sensitive supply chain information.

Can DemandLine help with customer demand change tracking?

Answer: Yes, DemandLine includes tools to monitor customer demand changes, including changes that violate your agreed-upon lead time and changes that put your stock and WIP at risk. It provides detailed reports and insights to hold customers accountable and improve overall performance.

What types of reports can DemandLine generate?

Answer: DemandLine offers customizable reporting, including:

• Stock and WIP you have at risk due to customer demand changes.
• Customer demand changes that violate your agreed-upon lead time.
• Analysis of customer demand changes.

How does DemandLine help resolve supply chain issues proactively?

Answer: DemandLine provides detailed reports to flag potential disruptions, such as lead time violations and stock/WIP that is at risk. These insights enable you to address issues and protect your revenue.

What industries benefit most from DemandLine?

Answer: DemandLine is ideal for industries with complex supply chains, such as manufacturing, aerospace and defense, retail, and healthcare. It is particularly effective for businesses managing multi-tier supplier networks.

USING SUPPLYLINE AND DEMANDLINE AT YOUR COMPANY

A Powerful Combination for Seamless Supply Chain Management

Achieve End-to-End Visibility

When you have both SupplyLine and DemandLine at your company, they bridge the gap between customer and supplier management, ensuring real-time visibility and synchronization across your entire business. SupplyLine enhances communication with your suppliers, while DemandLine streamlines collaboration with your customers. Together, they create a seamless flow of data that reduces delays, eliminates inefficiencies, and improves decision-making.

How They Work Together

1. Centralized Data Exchange Across Your Network

DemandLine manages interactions with your customers, ensuring their requirements are communicated accurately and reflected in your ERP system. At the same time, SupplyLine automates data exchange with your suppliers, enabling them to align their execution plans with your operational needs.

• DemandLine: Keeps your ERP up to date with customer requirements and provides analysis of changes to customer requirements
• SupplyLine: Ensures supplier execution plans and shipments are synchronized with your production plans

2. Enhanced Collaboration and Synchronization

DemandLine fosters transparency with your customers by analyzing their requirements, providing exception reports, and enabling real-time communication. SupplyLine complements this by aligning supplier execution plans with your operational goals through detailed performance metrics and multi-tier planning.

• DemandLine: Keeps your customers informed and aligned with accurate updates and clear communication
• SupplyLine: Ensures suppliers meet your operational demands by synchronizing their execution plans and addressing gaps proactively

3. Proactive Issue Resolution

By combining DemandLine’s customer-facing insights with SupplyLine’s supplier-focused analytics, you can proactively identify and resolve risks before they impact your operations.

• DemandLine: Detects customer-driven changes and provides actionable insights to realign production schedules
• SupplyLine: Flags supplier delays and inventory imbalances to keep your operations running smoothly

4. Streamlined Automation

Both solutions reduce manual processes, enabling your team to focus on higher-value activities. DemandLine automates customer workflows like demand schedules, acknowledgments, and shipment notifications, while SupplyLine streamlines supplier-side tasks such as POs, ASNs, and stock updates.

• DemandLine: Automates customer-facing workflows to improve accuracy and responsiveness.
• SupplyLine: Automates supplier-side workflows to reduce manual errors and improve communication.

Key Benefits of the Integration

• End-to-End Transparency: Gain visibility across your entire supply chain, from supplier execution plans to customer requirements.
• Seamless Data Flow: Leverage DemandLine’s centralized customer management and SupplyLine’s supplier collaboration for a unified supply chain ecosystem.
• Improved Responsiveness: Quickly adapt to supplier delays or customer changes with synchronized data and actionable insights.
• Reduced Risk: Proactively identify and resolve supply chain disruptions with detailed reporting and real-time updates.
• Increased Efficiency: Automate repetitive tasks to save time and minimize errors at every stage of the supply chain.

Ready to Optimize Your Supply Chain? Book a Demo Today and See DemandLine in Action

Discover how DemandLine can automate data exchange, improve supplier performance, and optimize your supply chain.

Contact Us

Have questions or want to learn more?

Visit us at exostar.com/demandline