The buying behavior of modern-day customers has completely transformed. Whether they shop online or visit you on-site, today’s customers expect the same experience. To meet increasing customers’ demands, retailers need to steadily digitalize their systems. This is where Order Management Systems come in.
Implementation of an effective OMS system can help retailers simplify the complex direct-to-customer commerce by streamlining their order management process, while creating a customer experience that enhances their brand performance, improves lifetime value, and boosts retention.
So, What’s Order Management Technology?
Also referred to as a “trade order management system,” an order management system can be defined as an electronic system that executes securities orders proficiently and cost-effectively. It allows brokers and dealers to track the progress of their orders for different securities types.
An order management system offers a centralized system to the distributers, from where they can manage all their channels including but not limited to a kiosk, mobile, store, web, and call center.
According to an estimate, the global OMS market will amount to $1.16 billion by 2023.
The OMS process is based on the following steps:
- New order creations and establishment of customer accounts.
- Inventory check-up, assessment, and evaluation.
- Availability checking.
- Inventory pickup
- Packaging, shipping, and delivery.
- Payments (for POS systems only)
Why Should Distributors Deploy OMS Technology?
As more manufacturers than ever continue to digitalize their systems, the distributers’ role in the supply chain has been seriously compromised. OMS can help them re-establish their position by strengthening their supplier and customer relationships and creating value.
Boost Sales
According to a report, B2B ecommerce is expected to amount to $31,547m in 2021. Since the B2B market is continuously evolving, distributers can only increase their ecommerce footprint by deploying cutting-edge technology solutions. ERP software has come completely outdated and they’re certainly not suitable for today’s fast-paced ecommerce environment. They lack the capability to join and connect several real-time inventories which eventually leads to disjointed processes and hence loss of backorders and sales.
By integrating ERPs with state-of-the-art order and inventory management solutions, however, you can unify disparate data sources and offer a better overview of the inventory to the customers. This can also help distributors in optimizing stock levels to ensure adequate fulfillment of orders.
Inventory visibility offers more transparency and lays the foundation for an effective ecommerce experience. Because of the unified view of the inventory, complex orders become easily manageable and customers can track the delivery details without hassle. This transparency doesn’t only boost their confidence in your services but they also remain satisfied and updated regarding the progress of their orders.
Cost-Effectiveness
While self-service capabilities and value-added services help distributors enhance their customer’s user experience, they still need to expand their margins, demonstrating a surging demand for greater innovation.
The worldwide business priorities have entirely shifted towards cost reduction and operational efficiency after the economic downturn brought by the COVID-19 pandemic. The cutting-edge order and inventory management technology can significantly help distributors reduce their operational costs across several avenues.
Minimizing Human Error
Automation of manual processes such as ordering, pricing, sourcing, and processing, can considerably reduce human error and hence the finances typically wasted on resolving these issues.
Smart Sourcing and Fulfillment
Instead of relying on an individual to choose the best fulfillment option, you can deploy Artificial Intelligence to assess all the fulfillment options and identify the cheapest option that complies with the SLAs.
Reducing Inventory Costs
With high transparency and maximum visibility into the inventory, you can easily identify if there are any redundancies and explore opportunities to mitigate the excessive inventory holding expanses.
Preventing Contract Penalties
The previously deployed conventional, ‘first come, first serve’ based processes are no more effective in meeting customers’ expectations. Distributors can instead use the supply chain technology to determine their order fulfillment sequence, based on the customer’s contractual requirements. This will also help them avoid penalties and satisfy critical customers.
Improved Collaboration
Data sharing between distributors and manufacturers leads to enormous trust issues. It’s however extremely critical for maintaining visibility across the value chain and allowing all the stakeholders to respond quickly when an unexpected event takes place.
This collaboration, however, only works with clear value rationale and propositions for data sharing, in addition to the jointly beneficial agreements. It offers massive benefits for both the end customer and the manufacturer and distributor.
Data sharing can also elevate profitability by enhancing resource coordination. Lack of data sharing between organizations often leads to blind spots. Data sharing enables them to pick the finest consumer outcome, whether it’s, drop-shipment, delivery from a distribution unit, or direct delivery to the customer.
Increased visibility allows distributors to react promptly to the market changes, balance protecting margins, effectively utilize store capacity and meet customer’s delivery expectations. This also helps the distributors to increase profits during the peak periods.
Strengthening Customer Relationships
As the customer demands continue to evolve, distributers need to digitalize their supply chains to improve customer satisfaction and drive profitability. Distributors need to prioritize strengthening their relationships with the customers by investing in their user experience.
Technological developments have made this more easy. You can seamlessly deploy technology to make smart decisions regarding your services and eventually boost customer retention.
Personalized Experience
Modern-day customers expect the same level of personalization from companies of all sizes. Because of this, distributors who don’t invest in creating a tailored experience for all their customers are often left behind.
According to stats, 71% of consumers feel unsatisfied if they don’t receive a personalized experience. Therefore, it has become increasingly important for retailers, suppliers, and distributors to implement systems that help them understand their customers’ needs. Personalization allows you to get a 360-degree view of your customer and improve their overall buying experience.
Distributors can offer sales catalogs to their customers and diversified pricing options based on the customers’ preferences, offering them a more relevant ecommerce experience.
Seamless Self-Service
According to recent data from Gartner, 70% of the customers use self-service channels. Improving self-service is one of the most effective ways to improve customer engagement and business productivity. When your customers can easily complete their tasks their satisfaction level increases itself and they’re more likely to return.
In addition to improving customer experience, self-service also empowers your team to save more time and invest it instead on high-value customers who need extra attention. According to an article published in Reverse Logistics Digital Magazine, customer self-service is the #1 force of change for the distribution industry. It transforms the way a distributor engages with its customers.
Distributors can allow their customers to complete their complex orders across several brands by streamlining their online ordering experience.
Modern Fulfillment Experience
AI is making supply chains faster, easier, and more reliable across the globe. It’s one of the most promising technologies for distributors these days. According to a study on over 2,000 respondents, McKinsey found that nearly 58% of them use AI in at least one of their processes. AI helps distributors to speed up their data analysis and effectively identify inefficiencies in their system.
On top of that, AI systems use market signals and past trends to forecast demand through predictive analysis. Besides, regular filing and paperwork cost businesses more than 6,500 hours every year, but automation can help you reduce this time invested in these manual jobs.
Turning Data into Actionable Insights
Distributors generally have access to massive amounts of data on their supply chain operations, customer behavior, and more. By implementing advanced analytics, they can completely transform their services.
However, despite the availability of these powerful tools, most supply chains aren’t as data-driven. According to the 2020 Grant Thornton survey, two-thirds of manufacturers claim their external supply chains (which entails their partnerships with distributers) are only partially digitalized, while 11% of them recognized themselves as fully digitalized. Furthermore, one-fifths of them still believed that their external supply chains are still in an analog state.
Given this, it’s the ultimate opportunity for distributors to add value to their services and maintain better relationships with their partners, helping them leverage digital insights to evaluate major pain points, improve efficiency, and predict and drive consumer behavior.
Need Help?
Are you a supplier, wholesaler, or distributor looking to improve your direct relationship with your customers and partners?
You’ve come to the right place.
At Order Tron, we offer the ultimate order management solution to suppliers to help them streamline their order fulfillment processes. Our online software is equipped with cutting-edge technology solutions to help suppliers at every step. By using our order management system software or order management app you can seamlessly process all your incoming orders, manage customers’ accounts, inventory, products, pricing, and invoicing.
Our online ordering system for business also generates comprehensive reports on required stock and turnover to help you improve your customer experience and relationships with your partners. We also offer you effective tools to integrate accounts and seamlessly streamline your operations.
Feel free to contact us for more information on our online ordering system software.