What a repeat order actually is #
Most trade suppliers have a core of customers who buy roughly the same thing at roughly the same interval: a pub ordering weekly, a site ordering at the start of each phase, a shop ordering every Tuesday. In the order system this looks like a customer with a long history. In practice it is one of four different things, and they are worth separating because they fail differently.
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A true standing order
Agreed lines, agreed quantities, agreed frequency, no confirmation expected. Rare, because both sides fear being stuck with it.
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A template order The most common by far
Same basket, quantities adjusted each time by the customer.
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An implied repeat
Nothing agreed, but everyone knows what Thursday looks like, and a missing order triggers a phone call rather than a shrug.
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A top up
Driven by the customer's own stock position, so the basket is predictable but the timing is not.
The first can be automated safely because it has already been agreed. The other three cannot be fully automated without changing what was agreed, and that is a commercial decision rather than a technical one.
The job is comparison, and people are bad at it #
Walk through what happens when a weekly order lands as an email or a phone call.
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Somebody pulls up the last one
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They read the new one against it
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They notice what has changed
Two lines are gone, one quantity has doubled, and there is a product they have not ordered before.
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They check the new line
Whether it exists, whether it is available, and what this account pays for it.
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They key the lot in
Every step there except one is lookup or transcription. The exception is the moment somebody thinks "that is twice what they normally take, is that right?". That instinct is worth protecting, and it is the first thing to go when the same person is also taking orders by phone and email all morning and sorting the depot inbox in between.
The failure mode is specific and it is not carelessness. When the comparison is done by eye, against a busy background, the lines that get missed are the ones that stayed the same when they should have changed.
Why "we have always done it this way" is not just a habit #
Long running trade relationships accumulate understandings that were never written down: what gets substituted without asking, what gets split across two deliveries, which order is held until the van is going that way anyway.
These have commercial weight, and some of them have legal weight too. Section 30 of the Sale of Goods Act 1979, which sets out what happens when the wrong quantity is delivered, carries its own limit.
This section is subject to any usage of trade, special agreement, or course of dealing between the parties.
In plain terms: how you have always handled a given customer can change what either side is entitled to when something goes wrong. That is an argument for the understandings living somewhere other than one person's memory, and it is the reason the loss of an experienced order taker costs more than the salary.
Which parts run on rules #
Runs on rules
- Retrieving the account's last order
- Comparing this week's request against it, line by line
- Flagging a line that has disappeared
- Flagging a quantity outside the account's normal range
- Checking availability on the changed lines only
- Applying the account's pricing
- Preparing a draft order for confirmation
The line by line comparison is the part people do worst.
Needs a person
- Deciding whether an unusual quantity is a mistake
- Ringing a customer whose order has not arrived
- Agreeing to a true standing order in the first place
The call to a customer whose order has not arrived is often the most valuable call of the week.
The signal hiding in the repeat #
A repeat order is a weekly report on the health of a customer relationship, and almost nobody reads it that way. A basket that has been quietly shrinking for six weeks, an order that slips from Tuesday to Thursday to not at all, a line that stopped: each of those is a customer leaving slowly.
The Federation of Wholesale Distributors says its members alone supply over 400,000 retail and catering businesses, so no depot is watching each account individually by hand.
That is the honest case for taking the comparison work off people, and it is not about speed. It is that the comparison produces information nobody currently has time to look at.
What to count #
For one month, tally what share of your order lines came from accounts that order at a regular interval, and how long a repeat order takes from arrival to keyed.
Then check something less comfortable: how many of your repeat customers ordered less in the last quarter than the one before, and whether anybody noticed at the time. The admin time calculator turns the first number into hours. The second number is the one that usually changes the conversation.