Order management systems (OMS) are the unsung heroes of modern business. They handle the whole shebang from the moment a customer places an order to the day it arrives on their doorstep.
Imagine juggling orders from your website, stores, and phone calls. It’s a circus act, right? An OMS brings all those balls into one, easy-to-manage basket. Customers love it because they get a smooth experience whether they shop online or in-store.
It’s no surprise that businesses selling directly to customers are big fans of OMS. But trust us, any company dealing with products and deliveries can benefit. From healthcare to groceries, an OMS can work wonders.
The numbers don’t lie. Experts predict the OMS market is booming. And businesses that use them are seeing huge growth. So, if you want to stay ahead of the game, an OMS might be your secret weapon.
Order Management System Process
The order management system process involves every activity engaged in accepting, processing or receiving and fulfilling an order received from a customer via multi sales channel. The first step in this process creating new orders and establishing or updating customer accounts.
Activities related to inventory are the important steps that include checking and maintaining availability, picking, packing and finally shipping. And if you are dealing with point of sale (POS) systems, the process also extends to receiving payment. Order to Cash is another term used to refer to an extended view of the order management process that includes managing customer payments, returns and refunds.
Benefits of Order Management
Enhanced Efficiency
An efficient automation helps in managing the task because these systems typically automate the workflow that are exhausting and rigorous for human error. Hence, the organizational process has benefited from decreased labor expenses and manages to target talents and focus on growing and fostering essential customer and vendor relationships.
Promotes Inventory Oversight
By providing leadership techniques with a bird’s-eye view of the order receiving, order fulfillment, and delivering processes still there is no such guarantee that it could run smoothly all the time, but one can guarantee that without the resources for systematic oversight, it could uncertainty fall short.
Improved Customer Satisfaction
Embrace every advantage as customer expectation is high most of the time, and the correct order management system will make sure there are lesser mistakes and rather better expectations set from purchase till delivery.
Reducing Operational Costs
A market full of variability try to optimize by streamline, automate, or eliminate rigorous workflow and better detecting trends which means rather more returns.
Larger Scalability
The order process becomes more fruitful, such software capacity generally promotes in both storage and feature capability once your order volume increases or becomes more complicated.
Order Management System Features
An OMS generally supports five primary areas within the order management process.
Sales channels
The OMS receives and combines data from every point of sale, including in-store, online, and call centre. Few goods also support orders from multiple global regions and various currencies.
Sales support
Information and availability about the items are updated in real-time for both your consumers and your manpower, including the customer service team. Omnichannel customer returns and exchanges are supported by the OMS.
Customer records
This contains contact information and the activity of the customer, including previous orders. That enables a service agent to recognize highly profitable customers and take action accordingly.
Inventory control
In addition to providing a unified vision of stock, which aids in controlling and tracking stock levels, the OMS includes inventory control algorithms that route orders to suitable warehouses and identify the greatest shipping options.
An OMS also presents information that is used throughout the management of inventory and fulfilment stages, including picking, packing, shipping and tracking.
Accounting integration
Records from the order management system flow into your accounting general ledger and subsidiary journals, such as accounts payable and receivable, terminating the need to re-enter information or transfer it in a separate process.
Order Management System Benefits
The decision to implement an OMS software normally leads organizations to check their supply chains for bottlenecks and areas of improvement. This analysis, periodically alone leads to improvements, such as swift fulfilment times. In addition, the benefits that OMS can deliver are:
Strong inventory management
Better and clear sight into sales supports you enhance inventory levels so that you meet the demand of the customer while minimizing surplus stock level. A collective view keeps you from missing a sale because inventory is in, for example, different locations. All these can boost cash flow as well as enhance the loyalty and satisfaction of customers.
Minimal data entry
As the same data is used across all areas of the sales and fulfilment process, therefore less data entry is used. It means less chance for errors.
Range of vision
The status of the order can be accessed and tracked by everyone, thus improving customer service, and you can enable consumers to track order status, too.
Analysis
A unified view of the dashboards of the order management system can inform decision-making by highlighting patterns of sales, tracking KPIs and forecasting sales.
