Order Management Systems: What You Need To Know
The term order management refers to the process of tracking and fulfilling your sales orders. Order management systems allow you to track that complete process quickly. In fact, having the proper order and fulfillment process is important to having great customer experiences. The order management process begins when a customer places an order to tracking that sales order until it’s completely fulfilled.
An OMS begins by keeping a record of your customers. Your order management system will likely keep track of;
- Name of Customer
- Customer Email
- Address for Customer
- Purchase History
- Purchase Volumes
- Payment Methods
Typically in an order management system, the sales department or ecommerce platform will send a sales orders. Those orders are then sent to the warehouse to fulfill and ship the product to your customer. Comparatively, your fulfillment process may be different depending on the business model you’re using.
While it seems pretty straight forward, the complete fulfillment process is complex. The process involves different people, departments, stations, data analytics and software to get an order, fulfill it and ship it to customers.
Problems You Face With Order Management Systems
As your company grows, you’re going to face challenges with your order management systems and order fulfillment. A new marketing campaign can be launched that overwhelms your fulfillment process overnight. Overall, it only takes one great day to hurt your company for the rest of time, can you really afford that?
In today’s connected world and with online ecommerce, new start-up companies can become huge successes overnight. Established companies can experience this same success.
Moreover, in order to be prepared for growth, your business needs to put processes in now. In brief, there’s several things you can do now to avoid problems, challenges, fulfillment overwhelm and bad customer experiences.
Outsourcing Your Fulfillment Process
Generally speaking, one of the quickest ways you can handle growth is by outsourcing your fulfillment or certain parts of your fulfillment to a 3PL service provider. Order management systems make outsourcing easier and lets you know where everything is at.
Thill is recognized as one of the top 3PL companies in the United States.
We provide warehouse management services too, we have multiple warehouse locations strategically placed through the United States.
- Neenah, Wisconsin
- Atlanta, Georgia
- Reno, Nevada
- Austin, Texas (In Progress)
- Lenexa, Kansas (In Progress)
Our extensive network of distribution centers allows us to ship your products faster and cheaper. As your company is growing, ensuring your products are getting to customers fast and cost-effectively will be important.
Reducing Order And Fulfillment Errors
While we can’t speak for others, Thill has a 99.9 percent accuracy rate. This is because we have the right processes and order management systems in place, playing a big role in our Quality Control. In the long run, this is also vital to a high level of great customer experience.
When you’re only fulfilling a small amount of products, it’s easy to quality control your systems. Once you start doing hundreds, even thousands of sales a day, it’s a different story.
The Right Order Management Software
Having the right order management software is equally important to your growing business. You need an order management system that provides real-time data and analytics. Outdated OMS can cause you problems and, surprisingly, there’s a lot of large companies out there using outdated systems.
Our powerful order management software suite does just that and much more. In addition to tracking orders, sales, fulfillment and product inventory, we integrate with the most popular ecommerce marketplaces and platforms.
You can see a few of those ecommerce integrations below.
Increasing Customer Support
As your business grows, so does the need for customer support. Fulfillment companies such as Thill offer customer support services. In fact, Thill has a 125 person team to help you with your growing customer service support.
Conclusion
In the end, your order management systems will always play a key role in operating a successful business. It plays a role in your order processing, fulfillment and customer service.
If you have questions about your own order management systems or questions about your fulfillment, be sure to reach out to us. You can reach our order management systems experts by calling 1-920-967-9201 or by using this contact form.
