Shoppers are intelligent; is your order management?
So you think your company can use its Enterprise Resource Planning System (ERP) to handle order management in complex models like direct-to-consumer (DTC) and multichannel fulfilment?
Don’t bet on it.
Even though most ERP vendors offer order management functionality as part of their software portfolio, their systems are not designed for the dynamic demands of today’s omnichannel and DTC consumers. Trusting your ERP to make your job easier, realise quick value and smooth adoption, or facilitate future requirements creates friction and lasting negative repercussions.
Find out why: My ERP has an order management module – Isn’t that good enough?
Order management is complex
It involves receiving high volumes of customer orders from multiple sales channels and assigning them to order fulfilment across a distribution network.
Those challenges require using next-generation, intelligent order management software built specifically for omnichannel commerce.
I’ve never heard of order management – What does it do?
Order management leverages specialised supply chain software that captures an order from a buyer – and then tracks and optimises order fulfilment through its lifecycle until it gets delivered. That includes publishing timely updates so the customer can stay on top of the progress of their orders. If the buyer returns an item, it will also track and optimise that.
When order management technology first appeared, the systems were used by enterprise retailers, manufacturers, and distributors to receive periodic orders for large inventory quantities. Those first-gen order management solutions were good enough when dealing with orders before the rise of omnichannel commerce. Then, things got much more complex.
Today, the need to orchestrate order management more strategically and efficiently has never been greater.
Read the essential guide: What is OMS (order management system)?
How do I know my business needs order management?
If you’re a retailer or brand having problems with:
- How to quickly and accurately fulfil all orders flooding your website
- High shipping costs from fulfiling orders from the wrong location
- Knowing whether you have the stock on hand to meet an order
- Lost sales and customer churn
Then you need intelligent order management to address your growing pains.
Order management, built for omnichannel
Most companies know they need to implement OMS features, stat. But they are simply too busy, short-handed, or underwater with orders to deal with a big IT project. Or, the thought of adding yet another bolt-on to their already taxing ERP or legacy WMS system is overwhelming. It doesn’t have to be.
Order management and DOM technologies fast-track growth for companies that want to strike while the iron is hot.
Benefits of an integrated OMS
When you consider the impact of legacy solutions in the next 5 years, your ERP is no match for the modern solutions available to the mid-market today. Create rapid, measurable growth by automating fulfilment, drop shipping, right inventory by channel, automatic order routing, and pre-ordering. Plus, it’ll make your job easier!
What does order management do for high-growth businesses?
- Ultra-reliable, up-to-the-minute data to balance inventory available to promise + inventory available to sell
- Virtually error-proof order pick pack ship tasks
- Huge labor savings – scale orders by 4X to 9X without adding staff
- Confidence that products will be delivered as promised, no matter where they are ordered or fulfilled
- Customers can track order status in real time
- Fast and consistent fulfilment times – under 24 hours
- Ongoing cost reduction and staff productivity improvements via supply chain data analytics, tailored to your business
Order management: effortless and fully integrated
Explore a truly integrated OMS & WMS platform that helps you easily see what inventory you’ve got, where it is, and where there’s new demand for it. Before you set out to look for an order management partner, it’s important to understand what it takes to make growth work:
- Supply Chain Simplified: Seamlessly connects all touchpoints of an order to improve decisions and speed workflows. From the time a customer places an order to when the product hits their door, and everything in between.
- Rapid Value: One team that makes sure you ask the right questions to effectively address top bottlenecks and priorities, like labor management. The partner should meet regularly with your teams, providing analytics and recommendations that improve decisions and accelerate value.
- Platform for Growth: Focus on scaling with adaptive, built-in “extras” like software integrations to remove the frustrating and costly process of managing disparate systems and unwieldy data exports for systems not built to sync with each other. This includes WMS, ERP, legacy supply chain systems, shipping carriers, order tracking, POS, and even customer-facing systems such as ecommerce OMS.