>I have a number of customers running my sales order system. They all have a 2 common problems which I have not been able to come up with a computerized solution for, so I am throwing this out for you to let me know if you have any suggestions.
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>Problem 1 - Through the night, the customers of my customer phone and leave orders on an answering machine. My customer's staff come in early in the morning and listed to the messages and key in the orders.
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>Problem 2 - My customer provides a price list to all his customers, with a space on it for them to write in how many they want. So every day, they get several faxes with the items and quantity required.
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>For both of these problems, I want to come up with a way for the orders to be entered in the system more efficiently. The general consensus is that the customers doing the actual ordering are not interested in using the web, or some other computerized way of ordering. The customers of mine, who are doing the selling have anywhere from 1 to 10 salespeople, so the solution has to fit their budget (i.e. we are not talking about huge companies here).
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>Any thoughts would be appreciated.

Hi Charles,

This sounds amazingly similar to an app we just installed. You may have already done what we did and if so.....

In our case, the customers were definitely not interested in using the web, in fact it was all we could do to get them to fill out the order blank that our client faxed to them. The new prices for approx 300 items are set weekly for each of the 200+ customers and the list, with a blank quantity column is faxed to each customer Sunday night. Most of them call back daily with orders and, if we are lucky, the customer actually uses the form which makes it easy for the client to simply fill in the quantities. Sometimes they fax it back and it is easy to transcribe from the fax. Our client thinks this is great and it certainly is a giant step from the totally manual system they used before.

So in short, without knowing the volumes you are dealing with, sounds like what you have is about right.

Ken