Ecommerce continues to grow. So do the number of promises you need to make to customers during the online buying journey. If you can’t make accurate pickup and delivery promises fast enough, the journey breaks. The sale is lost. Enter the digital promising engine.
What does a digital promising engine do?
Your digital promising engine must do three things really well.
- Ingest inventory data and process it super-fast. So you have an accurate view of what’s available to promise.
- Let you control what you make available to promise (ATP) to each sales channel, market, or region. Which is done through a combination of virtual segmentation of stock, managing safety stock buffers, and sourcing logic.
- Rapidly respond to availability requests. Lightning fast. So your customers experience quick page loads.
And today’s customers expect delivery and pickup promises to be made earlier in their buying journey. From Google search (or, as recently announced, Perplexity.ai search), to your product listing page (PLP) and product details page (PDP). And finally at checkout, where you need to make promises across an entire basket of items. That’s a lot of promises. Which means scale is important. So let’s look at how a digital promising engine is different from, say, just using your ERP to provide inventory data to your online sales channels.
Intelligent inventory data ingestion
A typical organization will often use their ERP or order management system (OMS) to provide inventory data to their online sales channels. But ERPs are slow. It takes time to consume all the Point of Sale (POS) transactions and do a full inventory sync with a commerce platform or OMS. And most OMSs are only able to process batches or streams of inventory data as sent. There is no logic applied to how inventory data is processed. This all takes way too much time to provide accurate promises to customers at scale. So, on the ingestion side, a digital promising engine must do two things really well.
- Consume data as either batches or streaming events. So it can directly consume inventory and transaction data from any other (ERP, POS, etc.) and not have to wait for another system to process it first.
- Smart data processing. If an inventory position hasn’t changed, it shouldn’t be processed. That would be a waste of time and processing power. By skipping unchanged values, your most important inventory positions get updated faster.
Once you’ve solved the problem of accurate inventory, it’s time to tackle ATP.
How do you control ATP?
There are three main ways to control your ATP inventory that your digital promising engine should provide. And most OMS vendors provide these features, but with varying degrees of flexibility.
- Virtual stock segmentation – You should be able to create logic pools of stock that you make available to different sales channels or regions. For example, you may not want to make all items available in every country, or in every sales channel.
- Safety stock buffers – Each stock segment should be able to have its own safety stock buffer rules. Because, for example, you may want to set a lower safety stock level for your own ecommerce site, and higher buffers for marketplaces that can’t consume your inventory updates in real-time, to prevent overselling.
- Sourcing logic – An advanced digital promising engine should give you flexibility in how you apply sourcing logic. And support different logic based on product attributes (e.g., bulky, fragile, hazardous, ships alone, etc.), location type or capacity, and inventory attributes (e.g., age, etc.).
And once you know what stock you want to make available, your digital promising engine needs to surface that data at speed.
Lightning-fast response to availability requests
Live delivery and pickup promises, based on real sourcing decisions before an order is placed are essential. Otherwise, you risk overselling. Canceled orders. And disappointed customers. This is what sets a true digital promising engine apart. How?
In traditional computing, an availability request comes in, and a promising solution (whether your ERP or OMS) has to process all the sourcing rules, one after the other, until it can provide a promise response. All on a single server. That’s slow. And it impacts page load speeds. So some solutions just use cached data instead. But cached data is stale. Old. And often out of date. It also doesn’t factor in real time factors, like location capacity or status. That’s where a digital promising engine is different.
It receives the availability request, then breaks it down and distributes the processing across multiple servers. What does that mean? Rather than sourcing logic being run in series, one piece after another, logic can be run in parallel. Which is much faster. And as a result, a digital promising engine can not only provide one real-time promise in a single API call, but delivery or pickup promises for multiple items at the same time. Which means a digital promising engine makes live sourcing decisions on the PLP possible. And fast. How fast? 24 promises in under 500ms. So you can make accurate promises and provide customers with a great experience. No trade off required.
A digital promising engine will elevate your business
If ecommerce is a core part of your growth strategy over the next 3-5 years, a digital promising engine is essential. It’s the only way you can scale your delivery and pickup promises across different sales channels and countries. That’s why brands, retailers, and distributors around the world have chosen Fluent Order Management. Because unlike other OMS solutions, it includes a state-of-the-art digital promising engine. Designed to support your digital commerce growth, at scale.
For more details on how Fluent Order Management’s digital promising engine can help you scale your ecommerce business, contact us today.
