Order Operations Manager / Order Desk Supervisor: Job Description, Salary, and Duties
$69,500/yearBLS median
An order operations manager runs the order desk: the people, the queue, and the numbers. The role sets staffing and cutoffs, owns order accuracy and on-time acknowledgment, handles escalations from key accounts, and decides where the team's hours go.
Order Operations Manager / Order Desk Supervisor Salary
| Source | Figure | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| BLS OES (First-Line Supervisors of Office and Administrative Support Workers, SOC 43-1011) | $69,500/year median | May 2025, 1,436,680 employed in the US |
| Fully loaded employer cost | ~$99,000/year | BLS median x 1.43 (benefits are 31.4% of total compensation per BLS ECEC) |
Order Operations Manager / Order Desk Supervisor Salary by State
Median annual wage for first-line supervisors of office and administrative support workers (SOC 43-1011) by state. Source: BLS OES May 2025, fetched via BLS API 2026-06-09 (SOC 43-4051, 43-5061 and 43-1011 states and SOC 15-1211 added 2026-10-22). States with suppressed BLS estimates are omitted.
| State | Median wage | Employment |
|---|---|---|
| Washington | $79,480/yr | 31,790 |
| District of Columbia | $79,200/yr | 4,080 |
| New York | $79,170/yr | 83,110 |
| Connecticut | $78,200/yr | 24,420 |
| California | $77,590/yr | 149,230 |
| Massachusetts | $76,770/yr | 34,520 |
| New Jersey | $76,640/yr | 55,210 |
| Colorado | $76,600/yr | 26,100 |
| Minnesota | $76,440/yr | 21,690 |
| Rhode Island | $76,030/yr | 5,090 |
Order Operations Manager / Order Desk Supervisor Job Description (Copy-Paste Template)
Responsibilities
- Lead the order desk team: hiring, training, scheduling, and coverage for peaks and cutoffs
- Own order desk metrics: entry time, acknowledgment time, order accuracy, and on-time ship rate
- Handle escalations from key accounts, sales, and the warehouse
- Write and maintain order handling procedures by customer and channel
- Review order errors and credits every week and fix the cause
- Work with sales, finance, and the warehouse on credit holds, pricing disputes, and allocation
- Report order desk performance and capacity to operations leadership
- Evaluate tools and process changes that take keying off the team
Requirements
- 4+ years in order management, customer service, or fulfillment, including 1+ years leading a team
- Deep working knowledge of your ERP's order, pricing, and inventory screens
- Builds and reads order desk metrics in Excel or a BI tool
- Experience handling key-account escalations
Nice to Have
- EDI working knowledge and how retailer compliance programs score suppliers
- Experience rolling out a new OMS, ERP module, or automation tool to a team
- Lean or continuous improvement training
Want this tailored to your order channels and ERP? Use the free job description generator.
Interview Questions That Actually Screen
How do you know whether your order desk is understaffed or under-tooled?
What to listen for: Measures where the hours go (keying, calls, exceptions) before asking for headcount.
Your biggest account calls your VP about a wrong shipment. Walk me through the next day.
What to listen for: Owns the fix with the customer, finds the root cause, changes the process, and reports back. Does not lead with blaming a clerk.
Which order desk metrics did you report on, and which one did you move?
What to listen for: Specific metrics with before and after numbers, and the change that moved them.
How do you train a new hire on 50 customers' order quirks?
What to listen for: Written customer notes and procedures, shadowing, and checks on early work. Not tribal knowledge.
Tell me about a tool or process change you rolled out. What pushback did you get?
What to listen for: Brought the team in early, measured the result, and kept what worked.
Job Outlook
BLS Employment Projections show first-line supervisors of office and administrative support workers employment rising from 1,506,100 to 1,507,000 over 2025 to 2035, a 0.1% increase. BLS counts every office and administrative supervisor here, not only order desks, so read the trend as background. What changes on an order desk is what the team spends its hours on.
Before You Post the Req
This is the person who decides whether the next hire is a clerk or a tool. If the desk spends most of its hours retyping emailed and PDF orders, automating capture frees the team for the work a manager needs people for: customers, exceptions, and fixing root causes.
- Manual order entry costs and error rates (BLS-verified per-order math)
- Manual order entry cost calculator (your volume, your wages)
- Free PO extractor (upload one of your real order PDFs and watch the capture step disappear)
How to Test Order Extraction Before You Buy
Vendors demo on a clean, typed, single-page order. Your orders are scans and spreadsheets. Here is the test protocol, the seven traps that decide the result, and how to score a trial honestly.
- How to build a test set that reflects what you actually receive
- The seven traps that break extraction, unit of measure first
- How to score at the line, so a near-miss counts as the error it is
- The questions to ask every vendor, including us
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FAQ
How much does an order operations manager make?
BLS groups order desk supervisors with first-line supervisors of office and administrative support workers, median $69,500 per year or $35.33 an hour (May 2025). Fully loaded employer cost on that median is roughly $99,000 per year.
Order operations manager vs order management specialist: what is the difference?
The specialist owns the order book: exceptions, SLAs, and reporting. The manager owns the team that works it: hiring, training, scheduling, and where the hours go. In smaller companies one person does both.
Should I hire an order desk supervisor or automate first?
Supervise people, automate keying. If the desk is behind because of orders arriving by email and PDF, a supervisor ends up managing a backlog that automation would remove. If orders get in fine but errors and escalations pile up, hire the supervisor.