IBM Sterling Order Management Solution Complete Overview:

What is OMS?

An order management system is a digital way to manage the lifecycle of an order. It tracks all the information and processes, including order entry, inventory management, fulfillment, and after-sales service. An OMS offers visibility to both the business and the buyer. Organizations can have real-time insight into inventories and customers can check when their order will arrive.

What is Sterling OMS?
How can it help businesses scale, achieve sustainable growth, and succeed?

IBM Sterling OMS solution offerings:

• OMS on SaaS - Let IBM run OMS software as a service for you on IBM Cloud or any cloud of your choice.
• OMS on a hybrid cloud - Use IBM-provided certified containers and RedHat OpenShift on the IBM Cloud platform. Orchestrate a multi-cloud deployment on any cloud of your choice or in your on-premises environment, leveraging DevOps best practices.
• OMS for on-premises - Deploy OMS in the traditional method behind your firewall. Use your installed infrastructure and manage hardware provisioning to scale up and down as needed.

IBM Sterling Order Management is an Omnichannel solution that helps in the tracking of Orders from their Inception to fulfillment. It also helps in managing the users,  processes, and data connected to the orders as the orders move through their life cycle.

IBM Sterling order management Is available as an on-premise offering as well as a software-as-a-service offering. The IBM Sterling order management on-premise offering can also be deployed on the RedHat OpenShift container platform to help you manage hybrid cloud and multi-cloud deployments on any cloud vendor. The SaaS offering is deployed on the IBM Cloud Kubernetes platform.

Understanding how we can use the IBM Sterling order management solution to manage your end-to-end supply chain flow with its different modules, add-ons, and components is important. So, let's dive into it.

We can easily integrate the IBM Sterling order management system with our existing supply chain to get complete visibility into real-time order information.

IBM Sterling Order Management  provides:

• Reliable order fulfillment – provides fast, on-time delivery with the ability to track status and get updates from any channel.
• Flexible order orchestration – make order changes on the fly – split shipments, locations, and arrival dates – from any channel.
• Unlimited fulfillment options – combine physical and digital channels – buy online, pick up in-store (BOPIS) – buy online, return to store (BORTS) – ship from store (SFS).
• Optimized order promises based on your priorities.
• Tracking reverse logistics (returns) including appropriate disposition functions back to the original order based upon flexible business rules.
• IBM Sterling Order Management provides an intuitive interface with easy-to-use functionality. You use configurable features for order capture, including real-time inventory, through to fulfillment, to power customer experiences that grow sales while improving profitability.

What benefits are provided by Sterling Order Management Solution?

• Accelerates transformation

Simplifies technology complexity creates new customers and associates experiences quickly, and scales confidently.

• Builds brand love

Always keeps the customer promise of convenience, experience, and service with flawless execution.

• Maximizes opportunity

Empower associates to convert every selling, engagement, and service interaction into an opportunity to fulfill demand.

• Improves profitability

Optimizes fulfillments, based on business rules, that maximize business results without compromising the customer experience.

Benefits of Sterling OMS are: 

• View the entire supply chain and isolate events to anticipate problems and develop more efficient processes.
• Get a single view of inventory, and see what's in stock, in transit, and current demand levels, which reduces the need to expedite shipments or maintain excessive safety stock.
• Match delivery commitments to inventory, resources, and skills; allow service requests to be addressed more efficiently.

IBM Sterling inventory visibility is designed to give us a unified view of inventory To see what is in stock and in transit, and to see current demand levels thus reducing the need to expedite shipments or to maintain safety stock.

What is the IBM Sterling Order Management Solution footprint?

The IBM Sterling Order Management System impacts these areas of your Order Management:

• Inventory Visibility and Available-to-Promise
• Order Orchestration
• Optimized Order Sourcing
• Call Center Experience
• Store Experience
• Delivery and Service Scheduling
• Configure, Price, and Quote
• Reverse Logistics
• Supply Collaboration
  

What is IBM Sterling Inventory Visibility?

IBM Sterling Inventory Visibility is a stand-alone cloud service, often called a micro-service that processes inventory supply and demand activity to provide accurate and real-time global visibility information across various selling channels. It also provides:

• Personalized dashboards
• Balanced inventory across channels
• Real-time views with Akamai gateways and Cassandra database
• Accurate views of warehouse and in-store inventory
• Auto-scaling without IT assistance
• Deploy, scale, and update capabilities independently
• Inventory velocity tracking
• Drop shipping
• Foundation for AI optimization

IBM Sterling Inventory Visibility updates the inventory picture immediately and provides accurate and real-time stock levels across all channels, including in-transit inventory. IBM Sterling Inventory Visibility also provides the ability to scale horizontally to handle increasing throughput requirements and unexpected spikes in demand.

IBM Sterling Inventory Visibility seamlessly integrates with any existing commerce solution via APIs. It is suitable for retailers that need to add inventory insight to their legacy order management solution and for growing retailers who are not ready for a complete distributed order management solution.

Retailers can use this information to optimize their business operations to enhance the customers’ shopping experiences and prevent inventory stock out and overselling.

IBM Sterling Inventory Visibility enables retailers to:

• Reduce carrying costs of safety stock.
• Reduce out-of-stock, oversell, and markdown.
• Increase conversion rates.
• Logically map enterprise inventory supply to demand.
• And provides customers visibility into available products and a framework that they can rely on.

Our inventory can be categorized into intuitive groups to provide an easy and delightful experience to customers When they order from online stores.

With IBM Sterling Configure Price Quote, we can reduce our sales cycle With automated pricing and approvals processes. We can quote region-specific prices to customers and focus on selling the products and services to customers efficiently.

The promising and scheduling modules use the Sourcing rules and distribution groups To determine the optimal nodes for fulfilling an order and to determine the dates for shipping, delivery, or pick up of an order.

A sourcing rule can be created by specifying one or more of the following key parameters:

• Item Classifications or Item ID

• Geographical region of the ship-to location or ship-to node

• Minimum available capacity

• Fulfillment type

• Seller organization

• Sourcing criteria

IBM Sterling Store Engagement add-on

IBM Sterling Store Engagement is an add-on to Sterling Order Management. It enables store associates to provide superior customer service that increases cart size and brings efficiency to store operations.

The application offers the following benefits:

• Reduces the amount of training needed to support customers.
• Increases sales and improves the buying experience by delivering compelling product information to customers in a store environment.
• Increases revenue and keeps customers happy by providing alternatives to out-of-stock items.
• Drives more store sales by providing multi-store inventory checks and alternative store merchandise pick-up.
• Increases margins by improving store personnel efficiency through better order and inventory visibility, advanced order picking, and efficient ship-from-store capabilities.

Sterling Store Engagement provides these capabilities for store associates:

• Anytime, anywhere checkout - A store associate can capture orders for the products that are carried out and save the sale for products that are not available in-store.
• Order search and modification - A store associate can find and modify an order in the processing stage instantly regardless of the channel (Online, In Store, or through a Call Center) from where the order originated.
• Buy anywhere, return in store - A store associate can accept and process a product returned by the customer, irrespective of how the product was purchased.
• Batch picking - A store associate can simultaneously pick multiple orders without having to walk through any department more than once.
• Receive in store - A store associate can receive inbound shipments at the store for inventory replenishment.
• Ship from store - A store associate can pick, pack and ship products thus turning the store into fulfillment centers.
• Personalized shopping experience - A store associate can get a comprehensive view of a shopper’s activities like browsing history, purchase history, and so on. This is used by the store associate to provide a personalized shopping experience to the shopper.
• Access to services provided in store - A store associate can view upcoming appointments and take appropriate actions. The store associate can also schedule new appointments for a service that a customer would like to avail at the store and flexibly manage the appointments as per their needs and convenience.

Additionally, Sterling Store Engagement provides:

• Shoppers the ability to buy products online and a store associate can record the customer pickup at the store.
• Store managers with a dashboard. The dashboard provides volume, priority, and fulfillment rate of orders through a consolidated, real-time view of order fulfillment status.

We can use IBM Sterling store engagement to improve the efficiency of our store personnel Buy getting real-time access to customer and product information. The buy online-pickup in store (BOPIS), and the ship from store portlets can be used to help our store associates to pick, pack, and ship orders with enhanced efficiency. IBM Sterling store engagement is location and inventory-aware and supports a broader omnichannel store strategy.

IBM Sterling fulfillment Optimizer with Watson is an intelligent analytic engine that enhances our order management system with real-time Optimisation and intelligent fulfillment capabilities, thus reducing our cognitive load.

IBM Sterling Intelligent Promising add-on

IBM Sterling Intelligent Promising combines inventory and capacity visibility with sophisticated fulfillment decisioning to help retailers maximize inventory productivity, make reliable and accurate order promises, and optimize fulfillment decisions at scale.

With Sterling Intelligent Promising, you can maximize inventory productivity by:

• Using real-time inventory visibility to confidently expose inventory and maximize conversions, gaining granular control over inventory actions, such as safety stock setting based on configurable business rules.
• Improving inventory turns by applying additional context like channel, fulfillment type and labor availability when making available-to-promise decisions.

With Sterling Intelligent Promising, you can make and manage order promises by:

• Improving conversion rates by confidently delivering orders and delivery promises across every step of the shopping journey, including the product list page, product detail page, cart, and checkout.
• Automating the review of inventory, capacity, and costs to make informed promises, and harness powerful AI during fulfillment to simplify complex scenarios like orders with third-party services and support a wide range of fulfillment options.

With Sterling Intelligent Promising, you can optimize omnichannel profitability by:

• Setting operating performance objectives and KPIs using real cost drivers (like distance,
• labor, capacity, and carrier costs) and profit drivers (markdown, stockout), so you can confidently make the best fulfillment decisions for your business objectives.

By optimizing across thousands of fulfillment permutations in milliseconds, retailers can ensure balance between profitability and the best customer experience.

Here are just a few of the benefits of Sterling Intelligent Promising:

• Strengthen shopper loyalty
• Manage accurate promises
• Maximize inventory productivity
• Leverage fulfillment optimization
• Harness artificial intelligence
• Increase omnichannel profitability

IBM Sterling Delivery and Service Scheduling add-on

IBM Sterling Delivery Service and Scheduling allows you to increase the value of each order by adding additional services to items being sold. You can schedule and manage appointments, monitor orders, create reports, monitor capacity management, create cross-partner coordination, and provide available-to-promise dates. With the Sterling Delivery and Service Scheduling you can also maintain a consolidated view of all your service specialists.

Sterling Delivery Service and Scheduling provides the tools to maintain a wide network of service specialists across various locations and provides a centralized, consolidated view of their calendars and schedules. These service specialists can be internal employees, external resources, or a combination of both depending on the geography. The availability of these resources can be viewed and scheduled when entering an order for physical goods or as a separate order transaction. These services can be activities performed on a product before the product is delivered to the customer or a provided service that is performed at the customer site.

Our delivery specialists can easily configure the IBM Sterling order management system To automatically handle the planning, monitoring, and shipping of orders, making our Logistics management efficient. 

We can use the delivery service and scheduling add-on to provide additional services along with the items being sold. This helps us to provide a superior experience to our customers by maintaining a wide network of service specialists for services such as the installation of a product at the customer site, or Maintenance Services of equipment we sell.

IBM Sterling Call Center add-on

IBM Sterling Call Center is an add-on to Sterling Order Management. It provides customer representatives (CSRs) with a single point of access to all commerce information needed to ensure a seamless omnichannel experience for prospects, customers, and partners in a call center environment.

Sterling Call Center provides your CSRs access to critical order fulfillment system features, in a UI designed for a call center environment. It's user center design makes the user interface easy to navigate, and allows CSRs to quickly complete these tasks:

• Order entry
• Item and inventory lookup
• Returns and exchanges
• Alert and exception management on orders
• Appeasements
• Reships
• Order modifications
• Price matches

With Sterling Call Center, your customer service representatives can better interact with your customers in the way they choose to do business – enabling order from anywhere, fulfill from anywhere, return to anywhere capability and schedule delivery or appointments at the time of order with built-in delivery and service options.

The key benefits of Sterling Call Center include:

• Enables your CSRs to see what the customer sees
• Dramatically decreases average call time through increased productivity
• Reduced IT costs to deploy, manage, and grow call center operations

IBM Sterling Call Centre is a web-based Call Centre solution That provides customer service representatives with a single point of access to commerce information. Order modifications can be handled seamlessly to provide our customers with a delightful experience.

In the case of Return or repair of products, We can easily get visibility into the supply chain of returning a product, and the returns are processed into individual SKUs. 

The self-service tool that is available as part of the IBM Sterling order management SaaS offering, Is a web-based user interface. We can deploy customizations, execute processes, and monitor various components of our organization's cloud environments by ourselves. It makes our processes independent, minimizes the processing time and enhances security.

Order Hub acts as a user interface Where our fulfillment manager can create personalized workspaces to monitor orders, nodes, and inventory across your network. 

OMS Provides Complete Order Orchestration:

• Central Repository for Order Information 

• Line-level Visibility and Orchestration 

• Multiple Ship To Addresses 

• Multiple Fulfillment Sources 

• Related Orders – Dropship, procure to order, build to order, return/exchange, etc 

• Coordination with External Services – Pricing, Tax, Address Verification, Fraud, Payment Processing, etc 

• Order Holds – Order and line level – Define hold effects and resolution 

• Coordination with Enterprise Applications 

• Order Execution Monitoring – Proactive / Reactive / Milestones 

• Extensive Auditing Capabilities 

• Reverse Logistics / Returns

Following are the are few more add-ons of sterling oms. You can visit official website of IBM for in-depth knowledge of them:

IBM Sterling Configurator add-on

IBM Sterling Configurator provides customers, sales representatives, and channel partners the ability to identify, configure, and select relationships between complex products, services, and bundles based on business needs. A configurable item offers various options that you can select before purchasing any item. Based on how the model item is created, the application displays various configurations that are available for the item. You can select the configurations that are most suitable for your business.

IBM Sterling Pricing add-on

The Pricing thing provides rules-based pricing based on configured orders as a common cross-channel pricing service and is restricted for use by Client personnel. This Cloud Service is not permitted to be directly invoked or called from the Client or other third-party external website or portal. IBM Sterling Pricing provides rules-based pricing based on configured orders as a common cross-channel pricing service and is restricted for use by Client personnel. This Cloud Service is not permitted to be directly invoked or called from the Client or another third-party external website or portal. To sell competitively in today’s multichannel environment, organizations need a way to easily manage product and service configuration and pricing rules that allow prospects, customers, sales staff, call center representatives, and Business Partners to quickly find, configure, and order the right products and services.

IBM Sterling Supply Collaboration add-on

With Supply Collaboration you can automatically create purchase orders to send to suppliers for drop shipment or replenishment, manages purchase order lifecycle, and track exceptions including updating order status automatically from linked purchase orders.

Sterling Supply Collaboration is an add-on component that enables you to effectively manage your inbound supply chain.

With Sterling Supply Collaboration, you can effectively manage your inbound supply chain is vital to your business and to customer satisfaction. Supply Collaboration enables visibility and event monitoring, combined with exception resolution capabilities to change or redirect orders and shipments, or locate additional inventory will enable you and your users to have immediate access to purchase/planned orders and releases, allowing for the negotiation of changes over the Internet, and for the capability to redirect orders and inventory to resolve unexpected problems. Supply Collaboration enables you to manage your entire order purchase lifecycle with real-time visibility, including all interactions with internal and external partners.

Web-based order collaboration is enabled by Supply Collaboration to offer easy access to information and communication changes. Additionally, the system maintains a record of all stages of the order negotiation cycle to assist you with dispute resolution.

Conclusion:

In today's fast-paced, omnichannel business landscape, having an intelligent and unified order management system is critical for delivering exceptional customer experiences. IBM Sterling Order Management provides a comprehensive, modular solution that can seamlessly integrate with your existing supply chain systems. With its advanced capabilities like inventory visibility, smart sourcing, optimized fulfillment, and self-service tools, IBM Sterling OMS empowers businesses to streamline their order orchestration processes. Whether you are a manufacturer, retailer, or distributor, this powerful platform can help you drive operational efficiencies, reduce costs, and ultimately drive superior customer satisfaction across all ordering channels. By leveraging AI/ML technologies like Watson, the solution future-proofs your order management capabilities, enabling you to stay agile and thrive in an ever-evolving digital commerce world. To summarise empowering businesses and maximizing results by orchestrating smarter omnichannel order fulfillment processes with IBM Sterling Order Management System.

You can visit the official website of IBM for more information: IBM Sterling OMS

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