For UK distributors, wholesalers and manufacturers
Order processing time: how to measure it on your order desk
Order processing time is how long an order takes from arriving with you to being entered in your system, and from being entered to being confirmed to the customer. How long that is on your desk depends on your orders and how they arrive, so time it: log every order for two weeks and read the median and the slowest tenth.
Or send us one order and see the draft it would become.
The two clocks
Two stretches of elapsed time, and the minutes of work inside them.
- Arrival to entered
- From the order reaching you (email received, call answered, portal order placed) to the sales order existing in your ERP. This is where orders wait in the inbox.
- Entered to confirmed
- From the sales order being created to the confirmation reaching the customer, including time on hold for price, stock or credit.
- Arrival to confirmed
- The two together. This is the time the customer feels.
- Minutes of work
- The time someone actually spends on the order. A five-minute order can wait two hours. Minutes of work are what the desk costs you; elapsed time is what the customer and the cut-off see.
What to log
Two weeks, one line per order.
Most of it is already timestamped: the email's received time, the ERP's order creation time, the confirmation's sent time. The desk adds the rest.
| Order or PO | Route | Arrived | Entered | Confirmed | Minutes of work | Held for | Corrected later |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 55812 | Email, PDF | Mon 06:52 | Mon 08:41 | Mon 08:47 | 6 | Nothing | No |
| 55813 | Phone | Mon 08:15 | Mon 08:22 | Mon 08:22 | 7 | Nothing | No |
| 55820 | Rep's text | Mon 09:30 | Mon 11:05 | Mon 13:40 | 9 | Price check | Yes, quantity |
Illustration with invented data. A spreadsheet is enough.
- Log every order, phone and portal orders included. Of the UK distributors with online ordering whose websites we read, 48% still tell customers to phone, email or use a rep as well (our research note), so compare the routes.
- Use working hours. An email that lands at 9pm starts its clock when the desk opens. Keep the real arrival time too.
- Report elapsed times as the median and the slowest 10%, not the average. A few orders stuck for a day pull an average out of shape.
- Note every order held for price, stock or credit, and why.
- Note orders corrected after confirmation. They feed your order accuracy rate.
- Pick two ordinary weeks, not a bank holiday week or the run-up to Christmas.
Reading the results
Two weeks on a desk taking 120 orders a day.
- Orders logged
- 1,200
- Arrival to entered
- Median 52 working minutes. Slowest 10%: over 3 hours.
- Entered to confirmed
- Median 9 minutes.
- Minutes of work
- Average 6 an order, the figure the calculator needs.
- Slowest routes
- Emailed PDFs and reps' texts, which wait for the person who knows the customer.
Illustration with invented data.
The cut-off
Arrival to entered decides whether an order makes the van.
Of the 108 UK wholesaler and distributor websites we read, 38 publish an order cut-off time, and half of those close orders between noon and 4pm (order cut-off times). On a desk with a 52-minute median, an order that arrives 30 minutes before a 3pm cut-off is more likely to miss it than make it, unless someone moves it up the queue.
So check the slowest 10% against the cut-off as well as the median. Then look at the orders that arrived in the last hour before it, and count how many were entered in time.
What it costs you today
Elapsed time is the customer's number. Minutes of work are yours.
Put your orders a day and the average minutes of work into the order desk calculator, with the cost of an hour including employer's National Insurance and pension. It shows the hours a week and the cost a year of keying, from your own figures.
In the example, 120 orders a day at 6 minutes each is 60 hours a week of keying, or 1.6 people working full time at 37.5 hours a week.
Illustration with invented data.
What you get from us
Order processing time is one of the two numbers we report.
We build AI into one division of a business and are measured on that division's own numbers. On an order desk, emailed, PDF and photographed orders are read and checked against the customer's prices and stock, and wait as a draft order for one click. Before we build, we measure the two clocks the way this page describes.
-
30 minutes
Call with you
How orders reach you and where they wait.
-
1 hour
Session with your desk
We time real orders through the two clocks. The same day, a one-page verdict: the workflow, the KPI it moves, today's baseline and a fixed price. Or a written no.
-
A fixed number of weeks
Build
Connected to your inbox and your ERP. Your team approves every draft order from the first day.
-
Every month
Run and report
Order processing time and order errors against the baseline. Stop at any report.
Where the time goes, step by step: sales order processing automation. Nothing is subcontracted.
Questions
What people ask about order processing time.
- What does order processing time mean?
- The time from an order arriving with you to it being entered in your system and confirmed to the customer. Measure arrival to entered and entered to confirmed separately, because orders wait in different places.
- How long does order processing take?
- It depends on the desk, the routes orders arrive by and the time of day, and we have not found an independent, sourced UK benchmark. Log every order for two weeks and read your own median and slowest 10%.
- Is order processing time the same as the time spent keying?
- No. Keying is minutes of work. Processing time is elapsed time, including the wait in the inbox. An order that takes five minutes to key can wait two hours to be started.
- Should we use the average or the median?
- For elapsed time, the median, with the slowest 10% beside it. A few orders stuck for a day pull the average up and hide what happens to a normal order. For minutes of work, the average, because cost adds up across every order.
- Do orders that arrive overnight count?
- Yes. Start their clock when the desk opens and keep the real arrival time in the log, so you can see how many orders are waiting first thing.
Next step
Thirty minutes on your order desk.
Tell us how orders reach you and when your cut-off is. If we don't find anything worth doing, we'll tell you and leave. Or send us one order and get back the draft it would become.
The Open Build. We’ll build one UK supplier an order desk system, free and in public, measured on its own numbers. Everyone who applies gets a one-page read of their own workflow. Applications close at 5pm UK time on Friday 6 November. See the Open Build.