A customer sends an order as a free-form email. It sits among other messages until someone notices it.
The order goes straight into one list, even when it arrives by email. Nothing waits in the inbox.
There's a PDF or spreadsheet attached. Someone has to open it, read it and remember what was in it.
The fields you need - customer, products, quantities, deadline - are read from the document and laid out for review.
The data is typed into a spreadsheet and from there into another program. This is exactly where typos and delays creep in.
This step disappears. A person only reviews the pre-filled data and confirms it.
The information reaches the system only when someone has time. Until then nobody is quite sure where things stand.
The system shows straight away who's responsible, what the status is and when the customer got a confirmation.