From inventory management and fulfillment tracking to analytics and reporting, order management includes a variety of complex processes that must all work together to provide an excellent customer experience. Rather than wasting valuable time manually completing the processes, growing businesses are turning to order management systems (OMS) to automate their daily operations.
An order management system helps your company’s strategy at every stage, from order placement to delivery and even returns. Choosing an order management system can be difficult because so many options are available, all claiming to have all the features you could need without actually delivering.
In this blog, we’ll walk you through the ideal order management systems for supply chain businesses, making it simple for you to decide the best fit OMS for your company.
What is an Order Management System (OMS)?
An order management system helps improve your order-to-cash cycle (OTC), which is the process by which your company receives, processes, manages and completes customer orders. Furthermore, it allows business users to quickly enter and convert orders or quotes, track stock levels, search and identify trends from previous invoices, verify shipping preferences, and modify pricing from a single system.
An OMS provides visibility to both the company and the buyer. Customers can find out when their orders will arrive, and organisations can have near real-time inventory insight.
I-Fulfilment: BladePRO
If you’re having trouble with order processing due to increased manual tasks, you should reconsider your current order management system and look for a better fit that can keep up with your front-end business growth. BladePRO could be the solution.
It’s a purpose-built order management system that automates and streamlines time-consuming back-office operations like inventory and order management, fulfillment and shipping, purchasing, accounting, and more, so you can focus on growth strategies.
Benefits of BladePRO as an Order Management System
A reliable and dependable efficient order management solution is required to perform at the level of customer expectation. Implementing an OMS will provide numerous benefits to your business, allowing you to keep up with the high level of competition and meet the demands of an ever-increasing digital world.
Consider the following benefits of BladePRO:
Speed of Order
Companies must find ways to ship quick and efficient orders, where 2-3 day shipping is the standard. The automation that an order management system can provide in this situation is critical.
When a customer places an order, BladePRO can select the fulfillment center location that is closest to the incoming order’s destination. Order details and even order history can be used to determine the method of fulfilment. It will then send a notification of an automated fulfilment request to that fulfillment center in order for its staff to prepare the order as soon as possible and ship it using the most cost-effective carrier.
Order Accuracy
Order accuracy is a critical component of customer satisfaction, and order management solutions can help ensure that sales orders are filled the first time correctly. Human errors are more likely to occur as your business grows and the volume of orders increases if you continue to rely on manual processes. Shipping the wrong product or using the incorrect mailing address can, unfortunately, harm the reputation of a fledgling eCommerce business.
However, by incorporating order management systems, you can easily and efficiently receive and ship the correct product. Using BladePRO software to streamline your daily tasks allows you to fulfil orders quickly and correctly and scale without becoming overwhelmed.
Real-time view of inventory
An order management system is designed to receive real-time inventory views from multiple sources. This means that businesses can accurately calculate their Available to Sell (ATS) inventories. Retailers who rely on ERP systems receive a broad estimate of stock availability, with little interaction between the POS and the rest of the fulfillment ecosystem.
BladePRO provides a unified view of inventory updates across multiple systems and can also include a real-time view of third-party inventories. This system allows vendors to see exactly how much stock they have available to sell.
Work on every sales channel
One of the essential features of an OMS is the ability to manage sales orders across multiple channels. BladePRO gives businesses better visibility into their entire order processing operation by centralising orders from all channels in one system.
There is also a continuous data flow across e-commerce channels, allowing your company to provide a more personalised service. Integrations with companies such as Amazon and eBay allow users to share customer account information, stock levels, product details, and pricing across platforms, avoiding the pitfalls of poorly synchronised order integration.
Eliminate manual processes
The most advanced and powerful OMS will automate actions in both the fulfillment and warehouse management processes. By analysing your processes, automation rules will adapt to the specific needs of your business.
BladePRO increases your company’s productivity by eliminating the need to handle order changes manually, providing real-time financial reporting and auto-invoicing, instantly hitting dispatch targets with auto-filling of new orders, and using auto-tagging to group customers for marketing.
Proactive Customer Communication, presales, while processing the order, Post sales
Shipping is clearly a sensitive subject for today’s consumers. Customers value more than just the timing of your order fulfillment process. 97% of customers expected to know the status of their order, including its current location and expected delivery date.
BladePRO assists merchants in meeting these expectations. The platforms include tracking pages when a customer requests an update on their order (or return).
Integration flexibility
The best OMS will integrate with other sales channels or software needed for specific business requirements. As a company grows, it becomes increasingly important that its order management system integrates across multiple infrastructures, service providers, and supply chain technologies.
While most OMSs include accountancy, fulfillment center, inventory, and customer support services, look for a provider who offers more specialised retail-based integrations. BladePRO offers extensive API access and support, as well as a plethora of pre-built and high-performance integrations. These include e-commerce tools such as Shopify, Magento, Woo, and others.
Key Feature of BladePRO
Once you’ve decided to implement an order management system, you must select the software that best meets your current and future business requirements.
Simply put, the best solution will lower your inventory management costs, streamline your order processing, and keep your inventory current with changes, eliminating the need for manual adjustments.
If you partner with a 3PL like I-Fulfilment, it’s important to choose an OMS that easily integrates with your 3PL’s software, these features of our software help further streamline your eCommerce logistics.
- Shipping optimisation – BladePRO will automatically search a panel of carriers to find the best price for you.
- Blade App – available for iOS and Android, providing you with 24-hour access to the modern world.
- Order Editing – Save partially completed orders for a later date.
- Financials - Tax rates that can be customised and multiple currencies.
- List Pages – Exporting results in Excel or CSV files with advanced tag filtering.
- Part Shipping– this means splitting orders into multiple deliveries and shipping from different fulfillment centers.
- Price Lists – Support for multiple currencies
- Products – Store levels are shared between products, and products are grouped by range.
- Shipping Rules – Shipping overrides for specific products, with the ability to manage your own rules.
- Integration - with popular sales platforms such as Shopify, WooCommerce, and Magento, together with major marketplaces such as Amazon, Wayfair, and eBay.
- Dropship integration – with Tier 1 and Tier 2 retailers.
The first step in simplifying your order and inventory management is to select an order management system. This feature of OMS can assist you in narrowing down your search for solutions that will work for your company.
However, regardless of which system you choose, integration with your sales channels and other fulfillment systems is critical. After all, you want your OMS to serve as a centralised location for processing and tracking all of your orders.
Learn more about how I-Fulfilment can help you integrate your order management systems.
