Order management systems (OMS) have the ability to transform your warehouse and your operations. An increase in productivity and an improvement in efficiency are just a few ways in which you’ll be able to benefit from a well-implemented OMS. However, there are a few questions you should ask yourself before embarking on incorporating an OMS into your general warehouse operations.
Questions to ask yourself when planning your OMS
The questions you will need to ask yourself before implementing OMS throughout your warehouse include the following:
What are my immediate business goals?
It’s important to establish your business goals before committing to an OMS. With full and complete implementation of OMS throughout your warehouse, it will affect your business in multiple ways, including, but not limited to, the following:
- Order processing
- CRM
- Forecasting
- Purchasing
- Inventory management
- Full and satisfying customer experiences
Think about what your business goals are now and what they might be in the future. Your answers will determine how and when you implement OMS. Identify the benefits, drawbacks and challenges associated when you commit to an OMS that, seemingly, works for you and will continue to work for you for the foreseeable future.
How is my OMS performance tracked & measured after it’s gone live & what KPIs should I be driving?
There are a number of KPIs that have the potential to be improved through the use of an OMS, including:
- Improving customer experience by reducing lead times
- Supporting omni-channel payments
- Saving the sale instore
- Optimising inventory allocation throughout the network and on a regular basis
Your OMS also has the potential to become integrated with a number of processes, including both internal and external ones. Those processes include:
- E-commerce website
- Shippers
- Retail channels
- Marketing processes
- Fraud prevention services
With the aforementioned in mind, a unified OMS will, naturally, have a wide range of critical benchmarks that can be easily reached and, possibly, exceeded. If all of your data is kept in a centralised location, then you’ll be able to consolidate, analyse and optimise your processes as efficiently and as effectively as possible. Think about how your KPIs can be tracked in order to view both your gains and your results.
What are my long-term objectives & ambitions for my OMS?
Make quicker and more accurate decisions on a regular basis through the use of centralised data. This is because it provides the warehouse owner and/or management the ability to see real-time information that will, eventually, drive long-term improvement across your warehouse. You should use both this current data and historical data to reach both your present and future business goals.
You should also take into account the changing requirements, industry needs and developments and, also, growth objectives in order to determine whether or not your OMS implementation is enough to handle such things.
If your OMS is able to meet your business requirements, then it’ll give your company the ability to bring business capabilities to a level where the experience of your customers and clients is seamless and interconnected, regardless of the channel.
What am I doing to improve customer experience?
If you’ve been trying to improve customer experience and still somewhat failing, then the secret to that success could be in an OMS, providing support across your omnichannel company in a bid to improve the outcome for your customers and clients, including making the whole process quicker and more efficient. It could also help with regards to:
- Reducing errors
- Improving shipping times
- Shortening delivery times
- Optimising inventory availability
- Ensuring efficient order orchestration
- Enhancing turnaround times
- Increasing time spent on customer relationship management (CRM)
An OMS will give you the ability to experiment, learn, improve and deploy a new and improved customer experience as quickly as possible across a number of different markets and brands. In turn, your business will be able to scale up and, as a result, improve profit margins and improve your customers’ experience with you.
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