Order management systems promote sustainability

Anyone who works with ERP systems knows the requirement for transparency: Only those who have the necessary information can improve systems and processes. That is the first task of order management systems (OMS), to give you as up-to-date an overview as possible of your inventory and its movements. Goods can be in different warehouses, with different ERP systems, in stores or even with affiliates and other trading partners. Once connected, you have transparency in real time.

OMS Processing

The next step is processing: more and more companies are selling via different channels, marketplaces and, of course, still via bricks-and-mortar retail. What happens if you put the last available item in the shopping cart but don't check out yet? In a good system, it is reserved for you for an adjustable time, remains invisible to other visitors for that long, and does not belong to the first person to press the order button according to the first-come, first-served principle. This also works on an international scale: it may be that this last item is located in a completely different country. Making inventories visible across all system and spatial boundaries helps companies to keep goods in stock in an optimized way with low depreciation. 

The next step is the optimized delivery of the goods to the customer. From the fastest shipment per item to the sustainable dispatch of multiple items from different warehouses in a joint delivery to the customer. In addition to sophisticated logic, this ideally requires AI to optimize deliveries to meet the company's goals. 

OMS can also respond to ad hoc changes from customers and adjust delivery. Whether the customer calls the call center or makes changes online, such as cancellation, change of quantity, execution, delivery location or delivery time.

If parts of the delivery are not to the customer's liking and are returned to a store (or another location if click and collect has been selected), the end customer wants things to be as simple as possible. A high level of automation helps the retailer to direct the cancellations to the right channel and to return the goods to the sales department. 

Optimized storage and sales, reduction of transport routes and minimization of returns thus lower the company's costs through improved use of resources. This fulfills another goal that is increasingly in focus: the expectation of end customers to buy from companies that are committed to sustainability. Many customers expect this from their suppliers and are willing to pay higher prices.

Sustainability

In Accenture's "CEO Study on Sustainability 2019," 99 percent (!) of the CEOs surveyed assume that sustainability will be important for the continued success of their company. Even if end customers accept higher prices if their suppliers are more sustainable, this does not apply to longer waiting times for delivery. And here we come full circle: with good transparency and processes that can handle complex tasks. With flexible adaptation to rapidly changing environments, fast deliveries to the customer can still be realized.