What if you could get every order perfect? Not just shipped right, but optimally routed, efficiently fulfilled, and delivered exactly as promised? If that sounds too good to be true for your operations, it’s time to attack order accuracy with smart order management.
Today’s leading retailers are achieving 99.8% order accuracy alongside significant improvements in other metrics touching customer experience – including outbound throughput, inventory accuracy, and hourly picking times.
Get 200% more efficient in order fulfillment. Deposco’s Bright Order (OMS) enhances decision-making with automated, intelligent order management software and DOM. All in real time.
How to calculate order accuracy
Before we get into the essential OMS capabilities for improving order accuracy, how’s yours?
On Time In Full (OTIF) is one of the most preferred KPIs for order accuracy and is calculated as:
# of Accurately Fulfilled Order / # Total Orders (%)
Best-in-class warehouse operations target order accuracy at 99.5% to 99.9%, according to the Association for Supply Chain Management (ASCM).
A few other metrics are important relative to order accuracy, including:
Fulfillment Metrics, such as:
- Fill Rate – 97% to 98% is acceptable
- Time to fulfill – can be a day or two down to an hour or two
- Picks per hour – 150 to 250 per hour
Inventory Accuracy Metrics, especially around unexpected backorders, customer satisfaction, safety stock, and transfers, all lead to higher overall costs.
Inventory Turns. Stock turnover ratio is how often and how soon a stock item is received, ordered, processed, and delivered within a given time period.
5 ways OMS improves order accuracy
1. Stop playing hide and seek with your inventory
You launched that new integration to a DTC marketplace? Sweet!
Sales are rolling in from all angles now? Awesome!
Now you’re moving twice as fast to find inventory that’s not where your systems or spreadsheets told you. Meanwhile, customers drop like flies as you fail to deliver…
Disturbing Truth: Roughly ⅓ of inventory is inaccurate or misplaced.
Leveling up your growth starts with knowing exactly what you have available to sell and where it is. You sell something, it immediately removes the item from your network. No mistakes, no wild goose chases, no expensive rush transfers, and no lost sales.
Modern order management systems provide real-time available-to-promise (ATP stock) visibility across your entire network with near-perfect order accuracy:
- See and sell all your inventory in real-time across all channels
- Catch low-stock issues before they impact sales
- Know exactly what’s available across your entire network
- Promise delivery dates with confidence every time
Altitude Sports is an omnichannel retailer that achieved 40% to 60% growth year-over-year after using Deposco’s OMS to eliminate paper-based processes that bred inaccuracies and inefficient store fulfillment. After fixing these problems, they saw a 30% increase in productivity and 20% decrease in time to fulfill orders. In addition, they have real-time visibility into all inventory, an imperative if you need to stop overselling inventory.
2. Inventory segmentation: right product, right channel
Perfect order accuracy requires more than just knowing what’s in stock – it requires strategic control over how that inventory is used. Modern order management systems enable:
- Channel-specific inventory rules and safety buffers
- Dedicated stock for subscriptions and priority orders
- Time-based rules for promotional campaigns
- Item-level control for maximum precision
This empowered ecommerce provider of musical records Vinyl Me, Please (VMP) to achieve a 3x increase in order output overnight. Instead of pulling from one inventory pool, our inventory segmentation feature gave each customer type its own inventory pool, enabling smarter prioritization and allocation. In addition, Deposco’s OMS eliminated a legacy cart system that was required for VMP to fulfill orders with multiple records.
Alongside tripled output, Deposco drove a 200% increase in fulfillment efficiency and a 50% rise in assembly line fulfillment for VMP.
3. Automated order validation: let robots do the boring stuff
The key to consistent order accuracy is removing manual touchpoints. Advanced order validation helps you do this by:
- Automatically checking order details against business rules
- Customizing validation by sales channel
- Streamlining special handling requirements
- Catching potential issues before they become problems
Even if you only have one facility, an OMS can prevent parcel carrier charges related to poor or incomplete addresses.
4. Intelligent order routing: optimize every decision
Without automated order routing, user decisions on where to route an order for fulfillment are driven largely by “tribal knowledge” and subjectivity. There’s no optimal way to confirm inventory availability across all fulfillment sources without manual actions that only decrease profitability.
Intelligent order routing automatically routes orders to ensure accurate inventory availability in complex situations, such as third-party fulfillment sources, split orders, and exceptions.
Smart order routing ensures order accuracy and profitability by:
- Splitting orders intelligently to minimize fulfillment costs
- Minimizing shipping costs through location optimization
- Ranking facilities based on business priorities
- Reducing transit times through proximity routing
Our ship-from-store store solution, Bright Store, got 60% of stores into their available-to-sell fulfillment network, increasing inventory available to sell online by 20%.
5. Order consolidation: the final touch
Now, bring it all together – literally. It’s not uncommon for a savvy customer to hit deals and place orders in three different channels. Generating three separate packages is additional shipping costs, time, materials, and effort for you.
The consumer doesn’t even like receiving three separate boxes! When they do, they assume that the cost of fulfillment is baked into the price somewhere.
That’s why order consolidation is on everyone’s agenda. Within your fulfillment system, it can detect these overlapping demands and ensure they are handled as a single request.
This function of order management empowers your business to activate ultimate order accuracy with ease of:
- Combining like orders to reduce shipping costs
- Minimizing packaging and handling
- Enabling post-purchase add-ons
- Improving the customer experience
Learn how our AI-driven shipping and parcel management solutions drive order accuracy and rapid savings.
Bottom line: improving order accuracy drives growth
When you improve order accuracy through modern OMS capabilities, the benefits compound:
- 30% reduction in inventory costs
- 10% fewer stockouts
- 100% inventory utilization
- 9-point increase in customer satisfaction
Most importantly, free your team to focus on growth instead of fixes. Your customer service team builds relationships instead of correcting issues. Your operations team drives innovation instead of fighting fires.
Start with a quick retrospective
Were you unhappy with your order accuracy and other KPIs this past holiday season? If your peak performance results wreaked havoc on your year, you’re not alone: while 93% of supply chain executives felt confident going into peak season, the statistics tell a different story.
Don’t fret. Learn from our peak season report, which offers actionable improvement strategies so that it doesn’t happen again:
“The Great Peak Season Reality Check: What 2024 Can Teach Us About 2025”