The continued growth of e-commerce and omnichannel retail has created demand for platforms that can unify orders across multiple sales channels and support flexible fulfillment options like ship-from-store, buy online–pick up in store, and curbside delivery. Companies are also seeking real-time visibility into inventory and order status to improve responsiveness and supply chain resilience, particularly amid ongoing disruptions. At the same time, automation and AI are being adopted to streamline order processing, optimize fulfillment routing, and predict demand more accurately.
Cloud-based and scalable solutions are gaining favor for their flexibility, ease of integration, and lower total cost of ownership. Enhanced customer experience expectations—faster, more transparent, and more personalized service—are further driving investment. Meanwhile, the rise of distributed fulfillment networks and multi-warehouse operations requires systems capable of intelligent order routing and reverse logistics management. Together, these trends are pushing organizations to invest in order management capabilities to enhance agility, reduce costs, and gain a competitive advantage in a dynamic, customer-driven market.
Order Management Solutions Overview
An order management system (OMS) is necessary for ensuring that the right inventory is promised to, and deliver efficiently, according the unique needs of each sales channel. An effective OMS will manage enterprise level inventory and its allocation across sales channels, optimize the efficient sourcing and scheduling of orders, manage backorders and returns, and enhance the overall customer experience. It becomes essential when a business outgrows manual processes, which are slow, error-prone, and cannot handle increasing order volumes.
The value proposition around order management is heavily dependent on your specific business and sales channels. SCT helps to define the needs and priorities based on impact to your business.
- Business to Business Order Management emphasizes a focus on inventory reservations to strategic accounts and channels, with capacity based manufacturing scheduling based considerations for longer lead time and build to order requirements.
- Distributed Order Management: Omni-channel Retail Order Management emphasizes minimizing shipments to fulfill orders with a lowest cost scenario that meets the delivery requirement of the customer. This could result in alternate facility sourcing, drop shipping, order splitting, consolidations, zone skipping.
SCT works with customer service leaders to identify the key requirements specific to their business, and scope, select, budget for, and implement the OMS to drive value across their business. Tangible results include:
- Improved customer experience: Accurate delivery promises, real-time order tracking, faster fulfillment.
- Cost efficiency: Optimized sourcing reduces shipping cost and labor.
- Inventory accuracy: Prevents stockouts, overstocks, and lost sales.
- Returns efficiency: Faster processing, reduced reverse logistics costs.
The Journey to Order Management Excellence
Choosing Order Management solutions partners that can flex and grow with your operation is a critical decision that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Implementations are both costly and risky – and post-implementation, business requirements will change. An order management platform should empower your personnel to adapt to a changing business environment while providing the tools to drive continuous improvement across the operation. Still, considerations for cost and speed often dictate more pragmatic direction when considering the appropriate partner.
Critical decision criteria when selecting an order management platform include usability, the ability to meet standard requirements, specialized or extended features, extensibility (the ability to customize and automate processes), optimization logic (and ability to deliver value to the business), technology and architecture, vendor relationships or ease of doing business, strategic portfolio (ie integrated supply chain solutions), partner ecosystems (enabling scale and cost management), and of course, total cost of ownership. While each of these can drive a decision in favor of a specific vendor or solution, SCT focuses on the following criteria to align to a short list of prospective partners:
- Business to Business requirements: Table stakes requirements in the B2B space include enterprise inventory management, order promising, basic order sourcing and transportation planning, and returns management. Integrations to commerce solutions, manufacturing planning, transportation management, and of course warehousing come in varying levels and can help to differentiate potential partners.
- Business to Consumer requirements: Table stakes requirements in the B2B space include enterprise inventory management (including store inventory and fulfillment capacities), basic order promising, advanced order consolidation and sourcing logic, returns management, and customer service functions such as call centers and clienteling. Integrations to commerce solutions, parcel execution, and of course warehousing come in varying levels and can help to differentiate potential partners.
For more information, see SCT’s commentary on Navigating the Order Maanagement Technology Landscape and Navigating the Order Management Services Partner Ecosystem
