Are you still lacking info to answer your customer questions and trying to sync up your orders across multiple channels? Then it’s time to consider a Distributed Order Management system. In today’s omnichannel environment its almost impossible to function without it. The benefit of omnichannel is that as a business you are able to understand and engage with your customer on a much more personal scale, but dealing with orders across so many touch points and ensuring it all runs smoothly requires flexible fulfilment methods, clear inventory visibility and efficient pick-up and return processes.
How can your business overcome these issues?
According to Gartner, more and more merchants are investing in a DOM. The DOM is a central hub where the order workflow combines with other systems that interacts with the order. Traditional order management systems are essentially configured to link a discrete number of specific manufacturers or warehouses, restricting inventory visibility and fulfilment flexibility. Without comprehensive visibility to internal and external inventory locations, including delivery and service requirements, it is nearly impossible to provide the customer an accurate ETA, maintain lithe inventory stock levels, or schedule orders for fulfilment from other locations.
The best way to overcome this is to provide a single, global view of all available inventory, to source the line-item components of each order with purpose and consideration, ensuring that the business can meet both current and future customer demand while optimising inventory, logistics, and asset utilisation. This must be done with powerful and configurable information systems, to avoid creation of a labour-intensive bottleneck to order fulfilment. That’s where the DOM comes in. Here are some benefits:
Multiple Fulfilment Processes: By adopting a central hub with the capabilities to handle all order fulfilment, it’s a smoother process and becomes far easier and more manageable, allowing for more defined workflows and extensive monitoring of results.
Cross-Channel Integration: Pulling together disparate sales channels and systems, making inventory sourcing across the organisation much easier, allowing precision and accuracy of fulfilment data.
The customer experience: Being able to track inventory across multiple channels means that you have far greater control over providing your customers with what they need when they need it.
Global visibility: Having your international warehouses and 3PLs connected to your system makes it easy for consumers to order and receive products from anywhere.
Marketplace integration: As mentioned in our previous article, Marketplaces are becoming commonplace for many retailers. A central Order Management system/DOM means process are harmonised and transparent, accessible and extendable. Thus, making it much easier to become a marketplace or sell on a marketplace.
Cloud / SaaS: Cloud-based systems gives brands the foundation that they need to grow. When updates are made to the DOM system, it is instantly available to customers without impacting the service and provides the flexibility for users to log into the system from any computer, allowing for instant data access from any member of the team.
Could your business benefit from these benefits? If you want to find out more about DOM’s or have a chat about other ecommerce and omnichannel options, please get in touch with Cursum today!