The Lead-to-Order (LtO) journey is fraught with unseen bottlenecks that can only be identified, unblocked, and optimized through process mining.
Imagine your salesperson enters an order where the final timeline and costs have not yet been agreed with the customer. The order goes into the LtO process as usual, but in a few weeks the customer balks at the actual scope and cancels it. You were counting on revenue from the sale and cannot figure out why it failed.
Like many companies, your LtO is probably not fit for purpose.
LtO failures lead to revenue leakage
In theory, LtO offers a seamless sales and fulfilment cycle for customers, via an end-to-end approach to managing the customer lifecycle across business silos—from sales to product delivery. In practice, if one step in the LtO process goes wrong—whether due to people, systems or legal administration—it can cause orders to be delayed or lost, and income to suffer.
Revenue leakage is the biggest problem in LtO today: 42% of companies report that they experience revenue leakage – and they lose around 9% of their annual revenue because of it. Visibility into the entire LtO process architecture is crucial for stopping revenue leakage.
There are five obvious culprits that process mining engineers have uncovered that cause this. Here they are:
The five biggest problems with an LtO process
Lack of transparency
In the LtO process, data is locked away in silos of people, departments, systems, and applications. This data hides a myriad of opportunities that can enhance sales efforts or achieve KPIs, but most enterprises do not know how to leverage them, or even if they are running the right core system versions to get the data out.
If a company assumes data is getting from A to B – and it is not – it lacks visibility of the LtO process. And visibility into the entire LtO process is crucial for stopping revenue leakage.
Poor customer responsiveness
Many processes are decades old, complex, slow, and inefficient. As the backbone of your enterprise, LtO is no exception. But with rudimentary analytics—combined with no single source of truth—companies are in danger of making false presumptions about their customer responsiveness. Because their “as is” process flow does not reflect the reality. And one bad experience can turn a customer off your services or products forever.
Bad resource allocation
Process mining experts note that without the right resources in the right places, your LtO process will be bogged down with multiple redundant tasks. These include reissuing estimates, adjusting proposal dates, waiting for legal paperwork, billing or reopening closed orders. Low productivity creates chronic inefficiency. According to MGI Research , 30% of companies reported that billing issues impact their financial results.
Process immaturity
In a time of advanced automation, many companies are struggling to take their operations to the next level. Enterprises that have process maturity are deploying AI-enabled root cause analysis to uncover bottlenecks, detect process inefficiencies, and even predict performance dips. These insights are not just informing process transformation, they are being harnessed across the organization for business intelligence – at a level that centers of excellence can only dream of.
Inadequate compliance
If any step in the LtO process falls out of compliance with industry regulations and standards, your company is at risk of financial penalties and reputational damage. Fines for processes that contravene the EU data privacy rule GDPR, for example, can cost you 20 million euros or 4% of your global turnover. The ability to monitor process conformance is not a nice to have, it is a must-have. Many companies believe they are doing it right, but they are not. The difference between performance and contravention is astonishingly high, according to process engineers.
What do all these problems have in common?
They cost your company money, time and resources. Sales opportunities slip through your fingers, inventory and carrying costs pile up, and customers head for the nearest competitor.
What is the solution?
It is estimated that between 1 and 5% of EBITA leaks out of companies unnoticed because of the five common issues identified above. But you can avoid revenue leakage by optimizing your LtO with process mining, enabling transparency from lead to fulfilment.
Process mining provides the visibility you need to detect process bottlenecks arising from applications, people and within the process itself. It identifies opportunities for improvements by looking at redundant process pieces or indefinite cycles, along with opportunities for cost savings. It also helps to avoid process non-conformity and align with process compliance rules.
But, it is not just a case of buying a process mining licence and away you go. In a complex world, where data is locked away in multiple systems, applications and manual processes, you need engineered solutions. This free locked-in data, create an automated ingestion pipeline, and integrate it seamlessly with powerful process mining capabilities – for intelligence that flows across the enterprise.
This is exactly what Persistent does together with Software AG. Our Lead to Order Solution Accelerator powered by ARIS—the industry’s first process mining solution—harnesses our engineering expertise to get your data where it is meant to be. You can load it into your process mining hub and run reliable analyses around opportunities, compliance, and revenue leakage.
Many of our clients go on to remodel their LtO process architecture aligned to their new flow of business intelligence and automate around it for continuous process improvement. The net impact: higher productivity, cost avoidance, faster time to opportunity, operational excellence, and accelerated business growth.
Contact us to find out how to achieve similar outcomes for your business—using ARIS Process Mining engineered for LtO.
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