Seminar 4

Seminar 4 Order to Cash (OTC)

Group Work Experience

This time it was our turn to give the student-led session, which was about order to cash. Although we seemed to have more than a week to prepare, no one had time to meet up during CNY given that 4 among 5 of us are Chinese. Our first meeting was on Monday. Before that I read through all the materials James posted on wiki, and searched for some detailed information, feeling that the topic was easy to understand and present. However, during the meeting, my teammates were complaining that this topic was too complicated. That was just because they had done a bit more than me: glancing over the textbook. Textbook is a mysterious object. Sometimes, it clears all your doubts, but it makes things complicated the other times. So we decided that each of us took up a textbook, and read through in detail before next discussion. 

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In the textbook I was reading, the OTC process was depicted in the order of generating all the documents, which was clear and easy to follow. The document samples were also very helpful in designing our activities. Our case of candy-selling company was from another book.  The troubles all these materials created were the inconsistencies at some points, such as when to do the inventory check and credit check. We cleared this with James, and what he said was right: Use your common sense. Sometimes, there is no one correct answer, but just an appropriate answer that is applicable for most of the common situations.

                                                           http://images.sodahead.com

The role play was really a big project to do. We need to be familiar with the process first. Then we need to give clear instructions, so other students could also understand. Every student must be assigned with some tasks, so the class wouldn’t be out of control. The tasks must not be too difficult, but they need to enable students to learn something… There were too much for us to think about, but the process was quite interesting. I enjoy the process that everyone works on different things but with the same objective. This is just like the rivers busy flowing at different places but they all know that they will meet at the sea. Hope our project 1 will also proceed smoothly like the rivers :) .

So here is some advice for the later groups:

1. Textbooks are really helpful, and you need read all of them to combine and appreciate the ideas. Since the books are using different business cases, you will see different situations.
2. Don’t waste time discussing meet-up time, since we are likely from different courses, and we are busy doing different CCAs. Just share the ideas with available teammates and later tell the others. Of course you need meeting at the stage where you need to combine the ideas and make important decisions.
3. If you have doubts, ask James as early as possible. Don't keep them to the last minute, because James will probably give you some other doubts, while clearing your existing doubts. This is because we haven’t fully understood the topic.
4. Don't give up your fresh ideas easily. They might not be as unrealistic as you thought, with the implementations and modifications of your teammates :) .

Review of Accounting

I just got too much to say in the part above. That was a meaningful experience after all. But the activities before our student-led session were quite interesting as well. The class began with Jeremy’s presentation regarding a conference he attended. The content of the conference was mainly introducing some sustainable companies, which was quite interesting.

After the presentation, we were given a small group project as usual. In the case, the company needs to allocate the rentals to each department according to some proportions, and post the entries every month, which is quite tedious if doing it manually. We were to give some approaches to improve the efficiency of this accounting process. After doing some research, we found two ways to solve this problem: One is to use recurring entry program to make the system post the entries every month automatically; another one is to prepare sample documents as a template so the accountant just need to click “post” every month instead of entering the transaction every time. SAP really is a system with many powerful functions! Maybe I will try some more during the projects.

Order to Cash Process

As mentioned above in the first part, I used to think OTC was a process as simple as receiving the order, fulfilling the order and settling the payment. But many problems will come out when we break down the process into detail. Actually, most of these are not problems in general, because different companies are doing things differently, and there are various situations where the processes need change accordingly.  For example, what’s the time to do credit check and inventory check? And is the delivery order or the packing list the one shipped with products for customer as a checklist? Etc.

The problems with the manual OTC process are mainly from the information out-synchronization and are easy to see. The customers usually can only access the sales department. So just consider if the customer wants to check the state of his order, this would be a nightmare for the company where salespeople need to tell sales clerk, and sales clerk needs to call warehouse supervisor, and pass on to shipment and maybe finally to the transportation. And what happens if the customer wants to change the order? When the information reaches finance department, maybe the invoice has already been finished or even issued according to the initial shipment date.