Top Signs You’re Ready for an Order Management System
An OMS (or Order Management System) is a platform or system to manage and track sales, orders, inventory and fulfillment from all sales channels. It automates and streamlines all the processes involved from when an order is placed through to delivery and returns.
A Distributed Order Management (DOM) System also includes a single, global view of real-time inventory and inventory locations. This additional layer of intelligence allows retailers to truly optimize their inventory allocation, fulfillment and distribution. In its most basic form, the DOM can fulfil a customer order from any location, based on predefined rules such as product availability, customer location and business priorities (fastest shipping, lowest shipping cost, etc.).
You can’t scale to meet peak demand.
If you’re manually handling orders, or if you have siloed systems that can’t speak with each other, you’re in trouble. Australia’s 2019 Black Friday and Cyber Monday sales events grew 31.6% YoY – a trajectory that is expected to continue. If your systems and business processes can’t scale to meet this demand, you risk losing sales and customers.
Lack of supply chain visibility is holding you back.
Where is your inventory? Where are your customers? Do you have complete visibility of your entire supply chain at any point in time? A single, central hub for your sales, orders, inventory and fulfillment is essential for any sort of automated fulfilment workflows, customer service, customer communications and reporting.
Manual work. Human error. Tediously slow order lifecycle.
Online shopping doesn’t have the same instant gratification that you get shopping instore. As soon as the purchase has been made, consumers are waiting. They’re checking their inboxes for shipping confirmation and then hanging by the door every day for the postie. If your order processing time is slow (manually processing orders, fixing any mistakes….) you risk losing customers. Australian shoppers typically view three to six days as the standard delivery timeframe – how does your average order fulfillment cycle time measure up?
You should be looking at a DOM (Distributed Order Management) System if you are:
01.
Ready to unlock the potential of your retail stores, warehouses, fulfillment centres and drop ship locations and offer customers omnichannel features such as click and collect, ship from store, drop shipping, in-store returns, cross border shipping and endless aisle
02.
Keen to implement sophisticated rules to dynamically decide where an order is sourced from and how it’s shipped
Learn more about Order Management and Distributed Order Management Systems
Download our eBook: OMS / DOM Systems – An Introduction
