What is an OMS and how can it help retailers?

By OneStock

OMS is at the heart of the omnichannel customer experience. As a supplement to your ERP, OMS could be the key solution for retailers to coordinate their various sales channels and improve customer experience. Indeed, customer satisfaction can be significantly improved through the use of an OMS, which offers a potentially better shopping and return experience regardless of the channel used.

What is an OMS?

OMS stands for Order Management System. The aim of an OMS is to centralise and optimise stock and order management, from the moment the customer order is received until the product is delivered.

In today’s complicated retail landscape, with more and more sales channels emerging (ecommerce, marketplaces, social media…), it is the role of an OMS to capture all the incoming orders, no matter the origin and assign the fulfilment to the appropriate stock point. The stock point can be selected based on a wide range of criteria and business rules. For example, if an order is placed for home delivery in a big city, it could be more cost-effective and environmentally friendly to have the order shipped from the nearest store as opposed to the central warehouse that could be hours away.

As such, the OMS has two main functions:

• Unifying stock: taking into account all points of stock (warehouses, stores, suppliers, etc.) and making this unified stock available to each sales channel (stores, mobile, web, marketplaces, etc.).
• Orchestrating orders: allocating customer orders to the stock point best able to deliver on the customer promise and meet business challenges.

What is an omnichannel customer experience?

With the shift in shopping behaviours and customer expectations, retailers are having to find ways to stand out from their competitors, namely by offering a better customer experience.

To effectively compete, retailers need to address questions that have an impact across their entire supply chain and supporting systems:

• How can retailers meet customer expectations and provide exceptional experiences while still maximising profitability?
• How can retailers maximise full-price sales and minimise markdowns?
• What does the future hold for stores, how can retailers leverage marketplaces and what roles will store associates play?
• How can retailers modify production and distribution processes to be eco-friendly and reduce their carbon footprint?

Many retailers are bringing together traditional and digital channels to answer these questions and make their customers’ omnichannel experience more fluid. Customers now want a flawless shopping experience throughout their entire journey and the ideal way to achieve this is through omnichannel commerce.

Did you know that 28% of shoppers¹ want a truly omnichannel shopping experience? For example, they want to be able to check the in-store availability of products that are displayed on a retailer’s ecommerce site.

An omnichannel customer experience includes:

• better access to the stock available for sale (thus fewer order cancellations);
• the ability to collect orders in-store thanks to Click & Collect and its Express upgrade;
• the ability to buy online and returning in-store;