Table of Contents
1. Introduction
2. What Is an Order Management
3. How Is It Important?
4. Key Features of Effective Order Management
– Automated Order Fulfillment
– Real-time Inventory Management
– Centralized Order Processing
– Proximity and Priority Allocation
– Omnichannel Processing
– Customization and Control
5. How Does the Order Management System Work?
– Picking
– Packing
– Logistics
6. Navigating the Challenges without an Order Management System
– Bulk Order Processing
– Inventory Visibility
– Omnichannel and Delays
7. Diverse Application of Order Management System
– E-commerce Retail
– Dark Stores
– B2B
– POS
8. How to Choose the Best Order Management System for Your Business?
9. Master Order Management for E-commerce Growth
10. FAQs
With the change in consumer behavior patterns, the e-commerce industry is experiencing a boom like never before. Its foundation and functioning lie in the flow of orders. If you are selling through more than one channel, this chain of orders will have many ends, and all the orders will flow to you at once. What if I told you that managing all these flows of orders from one point is possible?
Selling seasons change throughout the year, and depending on the product type and industry, there are some peak times when orders are rushed. Since multiple steps and people are involved in fulfilling orders, the probability of human errors increases. Now, if the rush of online orders gets messed up, it fetches the wrong information, and everything ahead can mess up. In the end, the domino of blunders will start!
This brings us to two things: the centrality of orders and the automation of the order process. Every problem has a solution, and most of the problems are from the operations. Therefore, streamlining your operations is required for any business to grow and survive. Let’s explore this further and explore the path of smooth functioning, maximization, and growth.
What is an Order Management System?
Let’s try to understand the value of an order in the e-commerce world. An order is an asset with an economic value for an e-commerce online retailer. Now, this asset can either bring you profit or have the potential to convert all your hard work into bane if it leaves a customer unsatisfied or your order is unfulfilled. It even has the potential to be converted into a loss if it gets damaged or becomes unsellable. While coming from multiple channels like stores, websites, or a marketplace, it also could get lost if managed manually.
The possibilities are endless. It’s on you to decide how you manage your orders so that each receives a systematic kickstart and is successfully fulfilled. The question that must be coming to your mind is, what exactly is an Order Management System? Order management or Multichannel OMS refers to centrally organizing and sorting your order before the order lifecycle starts. It connects all your sales channels, provides you a central visibility to your inventory, and finally brings everything together to fulfill the order successfully. All of it is automated with a streamlined workflow.
How Is It Important for Your Business?
Suppose you are standing at your front door, and the bell rings every minute. Each time, you must pick up an item, return it to the door, and hand it to the person. Sounds exhausting, right? This is precisely what happens in a warehouse during peak order times when the orders are coming from a multichannel system, and the order has to reach the customer as quickly as possible with everything being accurate and precise.
The manual processing of orders exposes you to more than 50% of the error probability and a slower workflow. An order management solution diminishes the chances of any error and ensures the accuracy of all your orders. It fetches the right data, locks the right pickup and package, and allocates the best logistics partner. This accuracy also diminishes the occurrence of returns in your business, saving you all your profits.
Secondly, let’s discuss the basic unit of processing any order: inventory. Suppose you are selling various product categories and numerous SKUs on your website, stores, and marketplaces. How will you keep your inventory in check? It’s next to impossible to function with a manual process for this. The challenges here are much more complex. Let’s understand this with an example.
Presume you list Product A at ten different sales channels and have 100 units of the same product. What product will do better in which marketplace, and when? It is impossible to predict. That means there’s a chance that your inventory can get stuck or face under stockings. There’s no way to find out how you should distribute your inventory. Hence, a centralized system of showing the same number of your inventory on multiple channels and processing them on the basis of proximity will surely be a smart way.
The order management system will sort out what you need to do, automate work centrally, and even let you customize your workflow with accuracy and efficiency. This one sounds like a deal, right? It will let you choose and set the logistics allocation rules. You will be able to get all the reports and data you want. Advanced technology will allow you to customize the documentation to your needs. From anything to everything, the system takes care of everything.
Key Features of Effective Order Management
- Automated Order Fulfillment
- Real-Time Inventory Management
- Centralized Order Processing
- Proximity and Priority Allocation
- Omnichannel Order Processing
- Customization and Control
Lets deep dive into the details –
1. Automated Order Fulfillment
When you have good order management in your system, you have the power of automation in your process. And you can easily unlock potential errors with the key of efficiency. An effective order management system runs efficiently during the picking, packing, and shipping stages.
When it comes to picking, automation is essential in helping you pick the right item in the right quantity within the right time frame. It organizes the orders so that you don’t need to repeat the process of visiting the same shelf repeatedly. You can pick it all in one go!
It automatically provides information about the appropriate packing and allocates the shipping as you require, so you don’t need to repeat that process for each order.
2. Real-Time Inventory Management
The sync of inventory and orders is the driving force in the e-commerce game. Imagine if your orders are sorted and organized, but you don’t have the required inventory to process them further, and order management again becomes dependent on manual work.
Hence, the right choice of an effective order management system—a solution that communicates and keeps a check on your inventory and eases your work—should automatically hop your order if the particular inventory is available at another warehouse and inform you as soon as possible of any discrepancy related to your inventory.
Other than this, central inventory visibility for all the selling touchpoints is one characteristic that makes the work easy and efficient. Hence, a smart seller would choose to manage it from one point!
3. Centralized Order Processing
As the name suggests, it is also an order management system’s most central and key feature. Because of this, even the other features can function efficiently. Centralized order processing means organizing, sorting, and managing orders in sync with inventory from one point. It brings everything from everywhere, all the selling touchpoints, to a single place.
Now that your system has information about what it needs to do, it becomes easier to sort and distribute the workout among the concerned people. It allows you to customize your workflow and how you want to process it further. It provides a unified interface for you as a merchant, and you are all set to sell!
4. Proximity and Priority Allocation
Have you heard of the term street smartness? Well, in India, this is the exact quality required to run any business. When it comes to e-commerce, the fastest ones to deliver are the ones who take the trophies home. So, ensuring you provide the fastest sometimes requires quickly taking charge of the action. To do this, you should have solutions like order management that are smart enough to follow your priority lists and operate automatically.
For example, a particular logistic partner does not serve some areas in the South but works best in the pin codes in North regions. Your system should be able to select the best partner for deliveries in the South without requiring repeated input after initial setup. You don’t need to do this customization after telling your system just once.
Talking about proximity, this principle is very important and ensures your e-commerce business efficiency. What exactly happens is that the orders are automatically sorted out from one central point and allocated to the warehouses from where they are closest to reaching your customers. In the case of omnichannel, the stores will operate under the same principle. Therefore, whether the orders come from marketplaces or websites, they will find their way according to proximity.
Read in detail – Top Key Benefits of an E-commerce Order Management System
5. Omnichannel Order Processing
E-commerce today lays the groundwork for e-commerce tomorrow. E-commerce today is also about the omnichannel that requires you to unify and integrate all aspects of selling, from marketplaces to websites to stores.
These days, expectations have escalated to hyperlocal fulfillment. That means fulfilling rapid deliveries in limited geographical areas leveraging local warehouses. It is only possible when the inventory is tracked effectively and the interface functions smoothly.
For instance, known brands like Chumbak or Lenskart all function on Omnichannel order processing, which makes them among the best at serving their customers.
6. Customization and Control
Automation or a solution doesn’t mean you have to stay limited by what a solution has to provide. Instead, you can control and customize as you want. With a smart order management system, you can customize the documentation and bills and control the panels. Give limited access to other users and practice the conformity of your business on your own.
Get the invoices how you want, with the features you want to add or subtract. Lock all your data with security and safety. Keep the solution business-friendly, easy to use, and super easy to sell!
How Does Order Management System Work?
Every order goes through these three different steps:
1. Picking
When an order is received, the first thing to do is pick it up. This refers to the first step of the order flow when a picker goes to pick the product. For this, picklists are regularly made. An order management system allows you to customize the picklist according to your needs if you want to start picking according to the channel, priority, item, or location.
Once you are ready with your picklist, you can choose the way you want. The automation of barcode reading ensures accuracy for you. Get a smart OMS with advanced picking workflows where fetching data is accurate, easy, and, most importantly, customizable. You can choose the picking basis and decide your workflow. For Instance, you want to process them based on channels, items, single and multiple products, or SLAs.
These advancements even let you track your picker’s productivity and, accordingly, decide the distribution of the work if needed. It gives an unofficial check of what is going on and in how much time and how much it should be.
Read in detail: What is Warehouse Order Picking?
2. Packing
The second step is packing. From label generation to the packing slip, everything serves its respective key role and is crucial for the whole process.
The packing slip includes the required order details and all the information essential for packing the material, including the dimensions, the weight of the order, and what packaging will fit best and be durable enough to reach the customer safely.
This stage generates the label, which helps allocate the logistics at the next step. This step also checks the quality of the packaging material and the product, ensuring quality services for your customers.
Related read: Packing Process in Warehouse Operations
3. Logistics
The last stop of the process is the allocation of the shipping provider. You can set allocation rules; your system will work according to you once they are set. For instance, you can allocate a certain shipping provider for a particular geography. Or set a priority list for your logistics partners so that your order automatically hops in case the first provider is unavailable.
Yes, a good and seamless order management system will assign the shipping based on all these factors you want to consider. It ensures that the workflow is not stopped and that all orders are processed within the timeline.
Challenges of an Order Management
In this expanding world of e-commerce, scalability rises day by day, giving you no time to process that scalability and the challenges are unavoidable as well as unpredictable.
Hence, all you require is a solution that has the potential to absorb the scalability of the coming future efficiently without affecting the workflow or giving it a pause. Let’s explore some of the common challenges of e-commerce merchants.
1. Bulk Order Processing
No matter if you are selling B2B or B2C, the processing of multi-package ordering and bulk orders is much more complex than the usual ones. You need a unified system with good efficiency that can process bulk orders efficiently and effortlessly without any errors and discrepancies. There’s no need to process these orders manually; you can do it like the usual ones in a few clicks.
2. Inventory Visibility
Will it be possible for you to keep track of the inventory after all the orders you process and how dramatic will it be in the case of the multi warehouses? If you hire people to do that for you, how much discrepancy in the digits can you face, and how many errors can you go through every other day? Sometimes, you might face challenges like needing more optimal inventory or out stockings.
If all of it is visible to you at one central panel, how easy will it become? Central inventory visibility can resolve issues like overselling, stock-outs, and maintaining accurate stock levels. This feature will be synced with your order management system.
3. Omnichannel and Delays
If you think you have to add something extra if you deal via omnichannel, then you are wrong. With a good order management system comes access extended to the services of Omnichannel. Your stores, online presence, everything can be engulfed in one single platform. This will eliminate your need to have a manual dependency on two different workflows online and offline.
Secondly, coming to the delays. The time it takes for the decision-making to take place manually slows down the whole process of order processing, and the chaos it creates is a whole different set of work. Therefore, keep your system automated and process your orders efficiently with an advanced order management system.
Diverse Application of Order Management System
Let’s see what are the different types of Order Management System the market of e-commerce has for you:
- Order Management for the E-commerce Retail- Functions for the warehouse and deals in B2B, B2C and D2C
- Order Management for Dark Stores- Functions for the orders placed online catering for the field of Quickcommerce
- B2B Seller Procurement- It functions on the transaction-based model. For this, the data is exchanged via an advanced order management system
- OMS for Point of Selling- It helps in the functioning of the stores
How to Choose the Best Order Management System for Your Business?
Other than all the features and characteristics plus abilities that we discussed about the order management system, what else matters is what other factors should be considered when choosing a system for your business.
1. Level of Support
Choosing the right software and making the right investment is not easy at all. You would want software that works all the time for you and handles things like a trusted employee in your absence as well.
Secondly, whenever there is a new feature added or a product gets upgraded, you should have access to direct support. Instead, a solution with a good support system and a dedicated team in the backend is what you should seek.
2. Onboarding/ Training
If you are one of those sellers with big warehouses, there’s a big possibility that you have to change your staff very frequently. This requires another hectic work to train new people.
But the right easy-to-use solution along with a supportive onboarding team is like a golden factor that helps your business in the long run. You don’t have to worry about the productivity and efficiency of the workforce anymore. Just invest in the right technology!
3. Compute Ecosystem
After the fact that how will you operate and who will help you operate the software comes the question of ‘What are you going to operate.’ The integration of services is a very important part of any business. When you sell any product or service to your customers, they expect the product, good customer care, and good packaging, and all of it goes unsaid.
Just like that you as a business owner and a B2B customer also should expect an integrated ecosystem with excellent abilities that will operate and handle everything from your warehouse to inventory and orders. So that the sync among all of them comes unsaid and you don’t have to keep the manual dependency anywhere in your workflow.
Master Order Management for E-commerce Growth!
Let’s go back to the first statement of this blog about taking risks in the world of business. The answer to this question is, why take unnecessary risks when you can maximize your profits and let technology lift the heavy, chaotic part? Not only will it make things easier for you, but it will also diminish the possibility of headaches caused by human errors and manual dependency.
Starting from the robust control over inventory, the full-bodied order management system is the backbone of the e-commerce business. Discover and explore the power of streamlined operations. Embrace what technology has for you and the growth of your business. Let your success story unfold in perfect, smooth operations.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the average sync time for the orders?
An advanced system’s average sync time for the order is 10 minutes, and for the inventory, it is 5-7 minutes.
2. How will I manage my inventory with order management?
You can easily manage your inventory with order management. By choosing a good solution it will automatically sync with your orders accurately.
3. Will I be able to manage the returns and exchange?
Yes, you can manage your returns and exchanges with accurate automation and the right tracking. It will help the flow of returns and exchanges.
4. Can I customize the workflow in OMS according to my business needs?
Yes, it is possible to customize your workflow. A good solution will allow you to customize everything from picklists to pack slips or invoices, labels, and stages of the process to fit your business needs.
Watch how Unicommerce’s Order Management System (OMS) helps in timely order fulfillment –
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