A Guide to Choosing The Right Order Management Solution
Recent news sources have noted the importance of notifying customers if items will be out of stock, providing seamless e-commerce and mobile commerce experience, and maintaining accurate inventory management.
In our experience, success in these areas starts with your online ordering process, whether you have one DC or a network.
How your business manages orders impacts the accuracy of your inventory data, which in turn shapes customer experience and efficiency.
When putting together your requirements for an order management system, there are several things you need to keep in mind. These things can be sorted into two broad categories: the channel that you use to interact with your customers, as well as your inventory management system.
Analyze the Channels You Use to Interface With Customers
An order management system is the first step in your customer’s journey.
Gathering adequate info at this point affects everything down the line, from picking and packing to deliveries. Additionally, providing accurate info during the order phase is crucial to ensuring that it's easy for customers to find what they are looking for, the information you are sharing about what's in inventory reflects what you can deliver, and you are setting customer expectations for service delivery properly. Because of this, you want to consider a range of options.
Online Ordering System
If you want to cut administrative overhead or make it easy to operate across multiple time zones, an online ordering feature is a must. It can seamlessly add to your business’ “data lake”. Forbes recently highlighted that, “The critical master data for supply chain management includes sales orders, shipments, inventory, lanes, and manufacturing capacity.”
Integration With Your Customers' Systems
Ask yourself what systems your partners are using to manage their own business and to communicate with other systems about their orders.
Depending on the situation, you may need a system that can integrate via API or EDI. This helps avoid tedious imports and cuts down on opportunities for errors.
Learn more about our software integrations here.
Order Capture From Your Sales and Admin
There are several ways to automate the capture of orders, and often time the right answer is an omnichannel strategy. If your customers prefer to interface digitally, you can integrate through API or EDI. If your customers prefer to call or email their orders in, providing them with an order portal can increase order accuracy and provide them with an immediate order solution.
Learn more about three key benefits of an order portal here.
Consider Inventory Management Needs
If you’re managing inventory, it’s important to consider how your order management system can aggregate orders and provide controls based on your inventory.
Additionally, Forbes and Gartner note that “real-time visibility of accurate levels of stock availability across channels is crucial to achieving a high level of speed and accuracy in fulfillment execution.”
Having a flow of information between your inventory and order data ensures that counts are updated immediately and that customers are notified when an item is out of stock.
Analyze Your Customer and Team’s Needs
When it comes to choosing an order management solution, we recommend reviewing the above questions, as well as answering these three questions to start to get an idea of your requirements and what to look for in order management software demonstrations.
1. Define your customer profile in terms of how they use technology.
Are your customers comfortable with technology? Are they already using an ERP or ordering system that could communicate orders automatically to their system? How motivated will they be to update their process so that both of your businesses can work together more seamlessly?
2. What experience do you aim to deliver to customers?
Does a seamless order portal matter for them, or are they looking for an easy way to pass their customers’ existing orders to you? Put yourself in your customer's shoes: what systems are they using to manage their orders? Are they trying to manage orders on a desktop computer or their phone on site? What are some challenges they have shared about your current ordering process?
3. Based on how you would like your customers to interface with you, what are your technical requirements?
Consider:
- What does your team require for this to be a feasible solution?
- What other systems might your order management system need to interface with?
- What hardware is your team currently using?
- Does your IT team require that you host all your technology on-premise or do you let a trusted third party host your solution?
The above questions make it easy to determine what your customers and your team need from an order management system.
Want to Learn More About Our System?
Find out more about our order management tools by browsing our other blogs, or get in touch with our team! Plus, stay tuned for our upcoming blog on setting up order management for e-commerce.
