Multi-channel order management
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An Order Management System for businesses, such as retailers, that operate multiple sales channels, including:
- Storefront sales
- Web sales
- Telephone/catalogue sales
- Kiosks
The goal of a multi-channel order management system is to provide a uniform customer experience regardless of sales channel, and to enable customer-service and sales representatives to view and manage orders across sales channels.
From a demand management perspective, global organizations are focused on unifying the order process, enabling multi-tier distribution channels, extending product offerings with services, and dramatically improving customer response times. From a supply management perspective, they continue to outsource more of the fulfillment process to partners and suppliers for the design, manufacturing, distribution, and installation of the product. The rapid adoption of the internet has accelerated the trend towards multi-channel shopping and reinforced the importance of the direct-to-consumer channel. The next big challenge facing retailers and CPG companies is to facilitate a uniform and consistent customer experience through integrated and synchronized execution across a complex and fragmented web of business partners. Integration and coordination between supply chain partners is central to harnessing the benefits of a customer driven strategy. In addition to the challenge of integrating with partners outside the enterprise, integration within the enterprise is an equally daunting taskThe unified order fulfillment challenge is compounded by organizations that have ageing legacy or divisional ERP applications with multiple instances that fail to provide a single view of inventory and customers orders. In an increasingly competitive marketplace, organizations have realized that the existing legacy order management and fulfillment systems were designed to support a monolithic order fulfillment process within the four walls of the business and not the multi-party, multi-tiered fulfillment process that exists in most supply chains. Companies must align processes and measures and rethink the architecture and applications that link key functions and external parties in this extended and increasingly distributed order fulfillment process.
