Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in May 2018 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy and comprehensiveness.
Did you know the attention span of an average human is eight seconds? This has fallen from 12 seconds in the year 2000. Why is this fact important to a retailer’s order management process? Customer buying patterns are changing just as fast and if you are not able to change with them, you are endangering your retail business.
Order management solutions need to adapt to customer buying patterns, which are influenced by a number of scenarios — strong sales promotions, store shutdowns, Black Friday deals, etc. This means that the rules that you set up for your order management process need to be easily configurable. It should be as easy as having several conditions and actions to choose from on a drop-down menu. Is that your experience today?
Most likely, if you are struggling with flexible order management, it might be because you’re operating with one of these order management systems (OMS):
Many light order management systems (OMS) out on the market can give you the basics such as rudimentary order routing settings and a simple way to set up a safety stock level. These systems were tailored to what legacy OMS developers envisioned the industry to be. But reality is that retail is constantly changing. So those systems were great — for retailers and brands that planned to have flat growth.
The other type of system that you might want to steer clear of is the custom-built variety. It looked agile when it came out, but those days are long gone. The solution may have been configured to your business at the time it was built, but as we have seen just in the past year, a retail business model can change overnight.
Retailers with light OMS or legacy custom-built systems will find it increasingly difficult to meet the elevated expectations of digital-savvy customers. To keep up, you need to adapt. You need to be agile. You need to be able to evolve with today’s customer. Having a modern, agile and flexible order management system is the first step to succeeding in an omnichannel world.