Successful businesses often share these common traits: they efficiently manage fulfillment, eliminate manual work and manage only by exception.
As customer expectations and supply chain complexity continue to rise, it is more critical than ever to deliver the perfect order.
So, how does this happen efficiently and profitably?
By automating your order promising, allocation, orchestration and execution processes. Only then can you intelligently choose how to fulfill orders based on your global inventory availability and business rules.
NetSuite Advanced Order Management adds allocation orchestration to NetSuite Order Management, enabling you to deliver the perfect order every time.
Let’s dive into six key elements your manufacturing or distribution business will benefit from when using this Advanced Order Management system.
1. Order Sourcing and Allocation
Automatic location assignment decides the smartest fulfillment location based on your global inventory and business rules. Merchants have the flexibility to set up and adjust automatic location assignment for multiple and different business cases. Optimize for reduced costs, faster delivery or a combination of factors and dynamically apply your fulfillment strategies. The optimized, rules-based capability enables a fulfill-from-anywhere solution across all channels and supports omnichannel ship-from-store scenarios.
2. Release for Fulfillment
Get control over your release-for-fulfillment process with a second automated process that decides when to release orders and notifies each fulfillment location of which orders to fulfill. Fulfillment managers have full visibility into the process—released orders, fulfillment status and order exceptions.
3. Exception Management
Merchants can automatically handle most order exceptions so the business can scale with fixed headcount. NetSuite attempts to fulfill exception orders then informs the fulfillment manager or CSR of an unfulfilled order. Exceptions caused by inventory discrepancies are automatically flagged for resolution.
4. Store Pickup
Merchants have full control over which locations and items participate in the pickup process. Advanced Order Management enhances the sales order to support store pickup and mixed orders. Once pickup orders are received, fulfillment requests are automatically generated, notifying the store of the order. When inventory is selected, the system notifies the customer that their order is ready for pickup.
5. Ship From Store
Save the sale by turning your stores into warehouses to meet customer demand, increase inventory turns and reduce markdowns. Merchants control which locations and items participate in the shipping process and allow store operations to intelligently choose the appropriate store to fulfill, while managing store capacity and inventory buffering to balance the needs of ecommerce and in-store fulfillment. This also includes built in, exception management functionality to accommodate store inventory discrepancies and capacity fluctuations.
6. Order Management Insight and KPIs
Better manage your business through increased visibility of your fulfillment operations. Measure your attainment of the perfect order with fulfillment request reporting for insight into the planned process, what happened and where you can improve. Utilize this new insight to create saved searches and alerts to stay informed. Combine these results with sales order and return data for insight and intelligence into end-to-end order management — from promising and allocation to orchestration and fulfillment, through to payments and returns.
Key Benefits
In addition to the features I listed above, here are a few benefits that stuck out to me:
- Satisfy omnichannel shoppers and make them brand advocates with prompt delivery and giving them the fulfillment options they want.
- Save the sale by enabling omnichannel fulfillment from wherever you hold inventory.
- Optimize fulfillment to meet demand and increase inventory turns while preserving safety stock.
- Scale your business but keep labor fixed. Efficiently manage fulfillment, eliminate manual work and manage only by exception.
- Deploy quickly and iterate as the market and your business change.
Need Help?
If you’d like to optimize fulfillment to meet demand and increase your inventory, feel free to contact us online or give us a call at 410.685.5512 to see a system like this in action.
