Digital commerce has exploded. As a result, so have the number of sales channels, and fulfillment locations. Think distribution centers, stores, 3PLs and drop ship vendors. Which poses two key challenges for retailers and brands.
The first is making sure you have an accurate view of inventory availability data you can present to customers before the buy button. The second is being able to optimize fulfillment after the buy button. To do this, you need advanced sourcing logic, so you can reduce delivery costs and split shipments, and maximize the margin on every order. Order management systems were designed to solve these challenges. But not all organizations use one yet. Why not?
Typically it’s because they’ve customized their ERP to perform some of these functions. Which, when online volumes are low, can work well enough. But once the number of orders and fulfillment locations increases, legacy systems don’t work anymore. Was an ERP designed to consume tens or hundreds of millions of inventory position updates in real-time? No. Yet this is essential when you need an accurate view of all your inventory data across all systems and locations.
Were they designed to respond to thousands of real-time requests for stock availability per second? Again the answer is no. What’s more, they don’t offer the flexibility in fulfillment rules and workflows that will enable you to fine-tune your fulfillment logic.
In short, ERPs can’t scale and flex to meet this demand. But modern, cloud-native, API-first order management systems were purpose built for just that.
“Fluent Commerce provides an openness that is rare in the order management market.” wrote Emily Pfeiffer, Forrester Principal Analyst, in the report. She goes on to write, “Uniquely, workflow tooling in the UI enables technical users to configure functionality, processes, and even the UI itself. It had top strategy scores, with strengths in performance, delivery model, and product vision.”
Further, the Forrester report acknowledges that “Fluent is strong in usability and configuration, workflows and notifications, and international orders and globalization, with a broader global presence than most other solutions in this evaluation.”
Stay tuned for more. We’re actively gathering feedback from our global customer and partner ecosystem, to help us build even better solutions. Your input provides critical insights as we strive to create great solutions to help you on your digital commerce fulfillment journey.
Learn more
Read your complimentary copy of Forrester Wave™: Order Management Systems, Q2 2023 to learn more.
