If you’re reading this post, then you’re probably considering upgrades to your commerce technology stack. Retail operations are becoming increasingly complex. Perhaps your ecommerce business has multiple warehouses and sells through your own sites and through marketplaces. Or maybe you’re managing brick and mortar stores and an ecommerce website. Or two.

Either way, keeping track of your online orders and your company-wide inventory is a challenge. Leading to a host of operational problems:

• Inventory is too high (and inventory turns too low), tying up your cash in working capital.
• Ecommerce returns are increasing because of an uptick in inaccurate orders.
• Your warehouses struggle to stay ahead, with greater complexity straining the system.
• CSRs are bogged down, using multiple systems to modify orders and resolve issues.

You already know that Order management software will give your company the enterprise-wide view of orders and inventory needed to turn the tide in your direction. But what’s it worth to you?

Pulse Commerce’s Order Management System (OMS) ROI Calculator is a great tool to help you figure out how much an OMS can help you increase profits, and what you’ll need to do to make it happen.

An enterprise order & inventory platform drives profit improvement a number of ways:

• Inventory Efficiency: Lower average inventory, and higher inventory turns, driven by inventory optimization.
  • Real–Time, Enterprise-wide visibility reduces need for “just in case” inventory
  • Intelligent Order Routing reduces “slow inventory”
  • Greater order accuracy reduces returns and reduces “dead inventory”
  • Ability to “ship from store” enables you to fulfill orders when warehouse is out of stock

• Fulfillment Efficiency: Reduction in work effort driven by higher order accuracy
  • Higher order accuracy reduces returns
  • Higher address accuracy reduces shipments to incorrect addresses

• Employee Efficiency: Productivity increases
  • Warehouses: More efficient order assignments, packing slips and shipping labels
  • Contact Centers: Faster issue resolution, because CSRs are armed with a single view of all orders, inventory, customers and fulfillment in real time.

And we’ve done the calculations for you!

• Reduction in average inventory increases cash on hand and cuts working capital expenses.
• Lower fulfillment error rates reduce return shipping costs, reduce warehouse effort, and also cut down on “dead stock.”
• Employees save time with more efficient processes.

Just input some company information and a few assumptions and you’re done!

We have a couple of additional tools for you if you’re actively shopping for an OMS.

• The Pulse Commerce RFP Template for Order Management Systems will save you a lot of time in identifying the most important features for your company.
• And our OMS Cost Saving Whitepaper, “5 Hidden Costs to Avoid When Buying an Order Management System” will help you better understand some important considerations when buying an OMS.

 

Nobody wants to create a Request for Proposal (RFP) document from scratch. If you’re buying an Order Management System (OMS) for the first time, you need to get educated on the general market and offering, learn which feature categories are important, and figure out the areas to investigate that you would never have considered on your own. Well, that’s a challenge!

 

Many clients have asked us for OMS RFP templates in the past. So, we’ve taken a stab at it, and we think we’ve done a pretty good job too!

 

This comprehensive Order Management System RFP template covers all of the important OMS feature categories, including some that most people fail to consider. And it has some nifty capabilities of its own:

• Overall Summary that automatically tabulates how well a vendor stacks up against the features you consider “must haves” and “nice to haves”
• Merchant Summary and Vendor Summary pages that auto-populate other areas of the RFP.
• Feature Prioritization and Filtering, so you can easily filter out the features that you don’t need vendors to answer.
• Over 125 OMS Features across 9 categories:
  • User Experience
  • Distributed Order Management, Customer Service Capabilities & Loyalty Tools, Fulfillment Capabilities, Inventory & Warehouse Management, Product Information Management (PIM)
  • Administration, Reporting & Analytics, and Performance, Security and Compliance,
  • Integration Support

We hope you find it helpful.  A recent whitepaper of ours, 5 Hidden Costs to Avoid When Buying an Order Management System, complements your RFP Template well, identifying some of the potential show-stoppers you’ll want to avoid when procuring a new OMS.

 

Please drop us a line if you have questions, comments or suggestions.