From David and Mike at Ultra Commerce

Split order fulfillment or distributed order management continues to evolve to maximize efficiency and handle new complexities. During the initial eCommerce boom, many brick and mortar businesses that adopted digital commerce capabilities did so separately from their existing order management systems. This proved untenable due to a number of factors, including limitation of catalog and ERP support difficulties. What emerged was the need for a more cohesive buying experience with greater inventory efficiencies and visibility for the buyer.

Enter the modern OMS: capable of managing the most complex orders, breaking them down to a line level and tracking or monitoring the fulfillment of those line items across multiple inventory locations to provide visibility to the buyer. This instills confidence in the buyer that their order will arrive in full and on time no matter how complex the components of that order may be. The modern OMS is sophisticated enough to scale while also maintaining flexibility in modeling.

What your OMS should look like when processing large, complex orders

Adding to these complexities is the need to provide for delivery and service schedules. From a product standpoint, finding and allocating the right inventory while managing the unique transportation and logistics requirements necessary is the starting point. But does your OMS also integrate the human component? Highly sophisticated service installations or white glove delivery expectations promised from the order will require your OMS to understand the resources in its system and that includes humans with the skill set to complete the delivery.

Managing reverse logistics with your OMS

In order to handle the complexities and nuances of the modern eCommerce transaction, your OMS must be a highly open system with a number of components interacting with it, orchestrating key steps from inventory to resources to delivery all in a seamless and efficient manner. This includes the unfortunate case of a returned product.

Managing reverse logistics must be accounted for in your OMS with those returns able to be processed at an order, line and split line level with status maintained through transportation to receipt by the supplier. Your OMS should track returns as a sub-component of the original order.

To learn more about OMS requirements for the modern eCommerce transaction, watch our recent webinar on the topic: