OrdersInbox Begins - What is it?

Oi! Welcome to OrdersInbox.

After 8 months of development & 1 round of funding from investors, today sees the launch of our new service, OrdersInbox.

Built to enable companies to better manage their orders that come in via email, OrdersInbox is a simple solution that will save businesses time and money.

OrdersInbox is easy to use, free for small business and is accessible from any browser on your PC, MAC or smartphone.

So, if you have ever lost, misplaced or not been able to find an order, take a look at OrdersInbox.

Thanks - Rob & Doug

PS Oi! is Australian slang for getting someones attention - read about it on Wikipedia here.
PPS Further explanation and background can be found by following the 'Read More' link below


Introduction to Concept

Many businesses receive orders from their customers via email. This is because it is a fast, efficient and near universal delivery technology - much in the same way as traditional post and fax machines were before email became more widely used.

And much like how traditional post and fax machines had a central delivery location (ie an address for post, and a fax number for facsimiles) many businesses have dedicated email addresses for their customers to send information to ie orders@mybusiness.com, sales@mybusiness.com, inquiry@mybusiness.com etc

And while the promise was different, most software programs that are used to manage email (such as Microsoft Outlook) don’t go in any way to reducing the same types of human intensive administration tasks (such as sorting, re-directing or managing orders) that occur when orders were sent by post and fax.

Put simply, email clients such as Microsoft Outlook were not designed as Order Management Systems. Our product, OrdersInbox is.

The Business Problem

Scenario - Peter's Electric

Peter runs his electrical business called ‘Peter's Electric’ and has 50 customers. When one of those 50 customers wants to make an order, they send an email to orders@peteselectric.com.au. While they are not large orders, Peter can sometimes get 30 a day.

Peter has a staff of 5 who intermittently check the orders@peteselectric.com.au email inbox throughout the day. When an order comes in, the staff member checking the emails will either action the order, reply to the customer asking for more information or forward the order on to someone else within the organisation.

It is as this early stage, that Peter loses the ability to track where an order is up to or if it has been actioned or not. Some staff use the ‘Mail Read’ and ‘Mail unread’ feature to help determine if a order has been looked at, while some create dedicated order folders, and put all communication in that folder. Some staff then use their own personal email address to send follow up information, which means critical information relating to the order can easily be lost of misplaced.

If Peter goes out for the day, he has no easy way of been able to determine how many orders have come in, without having to revert to asking his entire team. Asking finance to do a report takes time, and often, such reports are unable to be produced until the end of the month.

To summarise the issues faced by business who use email products such as Microsoft Outlook to manage their orders:

• No search
• Order information exists in multiple locations such as sent and received emails, documents and individual users notes
• No reporting capability
• Have to wait until order has been processed via ERP and/or finance system
• No ability for real time reporting
• Results not visible across the organisation
• No central location per order
• Users can not login remotely to view information
• Cannot keep a simple notes area that relates to order
• No history
• Cannot tell who has read the order
• Cannot tell if other emails have been sent and/or received that relate to that order
• No control
• Orders can easily be deleted or edited without a trace
• Confusion on which tasks have and have not been done
• No collaboration
• Cannot share experiences
• No ability to mine data for improvements in process

The Solution

OrdersInbox is a cloud based Software-As-A-Service (SaaS) product.

The main concept of OrdersInbox is that rather than an email being delivered to an email client such as Microsoft Outlook, it will be delivered to the companies dedicated OrdersInbox instance. In this way, OrdersInbox is just like a normal email client.

From that point on, the differences could not be more stark. For one, as soon as email arrives into OrdersInbox, it can always be found and reported on. If it's for a new order, an order will be created and the email automatically attached to it. The order can then be labelled based on any set of values as defined by the customer - image 1.1 shows an example of frequently used labels.

Image 1.1

Any label that is applied (all labels are customisable) can then be both searched and reported on.

If the email relates to an existing order, it will be automatically associated with that order. Users can be assigned to orders, and notifications sent based on permissions.

Because each order has its own homepage, it means that one central location is created to store all information that relates to that order - it is the virtual equivalent of a filing cabinet, but made specifically for order management.

It sounds simple - and in many ways, it is.

And the reason for this? Because it makes it easier for people to work more productively, without forcing them to change the way they work.