Key challenges and solutions of Order Management Process

“Don’t assume it all works! Put yourself in your customer’s shoes and do everything that they would do!” – Gary Gebenlien

Many businesses continue to work with complex, fragmented order management processes with multiple order capture and fulfillment systems. This increases the chances of facing challenging situations throughout the order fulfillment process. For a successful fulfillment process, you need to make sure to get the right products to the right customers at the right time especially when it’s almost time for seasonal sales! Let us give you a roundabout of the frequent obstacles that come up in the order management process.

What are the main Adversities in the Order Management Process?

1. Processing Data: Manual updates are subject to duplication or data with human errors. With multiple orders from multiple channels, it is impossible for you to keep track.  

2. Executing Bulk Orders systematically: When you have to handle orders in bulk it gets complex. Because it involves making many updates in internal systems, marketplaces, creating invoices, label printing, and shipping arrangements.

3. Planning Inventory: Order fulfillment is all about meeting the expectations from customers at the right time. It is not possible to do that if you often remain ‘out of stock’. To know your stock levels you need to have real-time visibility for your inventory. On the contrary sometimes it is also excessive stocking which leads to wastage and dead stock. Hence a systematic planning and stocking of inventory is extremely crucial for a successful retail business.

4. Managing System Integration: In a standalone or a manually fed Order management system,  the functions are not sufficient to handle multi-channel sales orders. Therefore you may find several hiccups in managing the orders.

These situations can grow complex if not rectified at the right time.

How to counter the challenges in Order Management?

Ecommerce businesses are rapidly responding to the challenges and pressures by optimizing their supply chain management system. Here is what you need to do:

For Seasonal Sales: 

Optimize the Inventory for Rapid Handling

Maintaining a delicate balance of stock and stock reordering is quite business-critical. Extra stock in the warehouse than required increases your storage and carrying costs. And if you have less stock in the warehouse than required, you will lose orders, credibility, and revenue. You should know when to replenish the stock to utilize the warehouse space optimally.

The categorization of inventory depends on factors like the types of products and picking sizes. You can classify inventory based on picking size and by frequency of picking/velocity of movement. 

Strategize Order Manifestation for Easy Processing

The most important part of your business is the process of actually getting your products to your customers. If you own a brick-and-mortar store, this isn’t much of an issue as your customers can simply grab what they need right off of the shelf. But if you ship your products, it is a lot more hassling.

The accurate and on-time delivery of products is essential for your business growth. For that you have to maintain five touchpoints:

Inventory accuracy

Optimizing your picking strategy

Logistics management and integration with suppliers

An advanced warehouse management system

Real-time visibility of your entire supply chain

As Customers Don’t like to wait: 

Automate to Speed up the Operations

Automated storage and retrieval technologies support the optimization of the order fulfillment process. Most companies focus the majority of their equipment investments on handling their fast movers. You need to make sure that everything is done automatically. For instance, deciding where to route the order, selecting appropriate shipping partners and replenishing inventory. This not only speeds up order fulfillment but also provides more accurate data for future orders. 

A best-fit ERP software will integrate and systematically streamline all your business processes and ensure growth and success in desired time goals.

Integrate systems for enhanced visibility

Adopting a cloud-based inventory management system is the easiest way to increase the visibility of inventory across all channels. You need to ensure cloud systems provide a flexible and secure environment to integrate and manage all stock levels, across all sales channels under a single interface.

Your order management system should be pre-integrated with your ERPs. With a single click you will be able to unify information on sales, payments, returns or other accounting details.

Track in for Instant Updates

Allocate shipping providers based on priority. Shipment of fragile items or inflammable items needs to be shipped separately. Keep a count of items in stock and out-of-stock of the same order that has to be shipped. So, instead of managing everything on your own, enable your seller to ship the product directly to the consumers through drop shipping. It ensures:

• Strong vendor relationship
• High product assortments
• Low inventory carrying cost
• Low stock-outs
• Faster delivery time

Maintain an end-to-end tracking of shipment statuses. It improves the end customer experience. The real-time insight from smart labels such as barcode enables efficient tracking. It processes items that are in, through and out of the warehouse.

In today’s unprecedented times while we all need to maintain social distancing and move out of our homes only when very necessary, eCommerce business is in its ultimate peak. The demand for online shopping has increased resulting in over orders and excessive deliveries which need to be executed systematically to achieve loyalty and repeat orders from customers. One bad experience of a customer means loss of an important part of your business. This also adds to the badwill of the organisation. Hence in the present market scenario we need to ensure 100% customer satisfaction to achieve success.

Expand smERP is the best ERP company in India for mid-sized manufacturers in the retail industry. We have third-party integrations with Blue Dart and Shiprocket logistics for the best services in shipment of your deliveries. Our order management system has a value-added structure of your retail operation to run your order fulfillment process smoothly from anywhere, anytime.