Despite all the technology available to us today, a pen and paper for taking notes, explaining something to a customer or diagram can be much faster than powering up a computer, loading software and doing these things on a computer. And not everyone was born with a computer in their hand, and is ready to produce everything using a computer.
The day to day business situation of taking orders on an order sheet while out on the road are still with us. We could get a computer tablet and type on the screen and link directly to your accounts system. But tablets require software and tablets require a human to use them. Yes, if you have a top of the range accounts package that can be linked to tablets and a support department to manage them, then go ahead, use a tablet, they save far more time adn reduce errors. But for those of you who want to keep it simple, an order sheet, laid out in the format that when you send the email back to the sales office, the back sales office support staff can simply type it into the accounts system knowing that the information on the order sheet is in an organised structure.
The sales rep must complete the sales order form in full. In a computer system it would not allow the sales rep to bypass and details. This is good discipline, so that if and when a computer tablet replaces the sales rep’s pen and paper, they will understand that detail is required for every order and will be doing it automatically.
To speed up the whole process you can use your mobile phone to take a photo of the order sheet and then email it back to the sales office. The sales rep can do more calls, the sales office gets orders back on time, and orders get delivered to clients on time.