An Order Management System (OMS) is an intelligent technological tool that maximizes merchants’ e-commerce performance by centralizing orders and inventory from all their sales channels (Marketplaces, CMS, Private Sales) in a single interface, saving them precious time by eliminating the need to go into each store’s back office to manage orders and inventory.
For merchants, it is a means of deploying an efficient, high-performance omnichannel logistics strategy. With OMS e commerce, merchants can view and manage all their orders and inventory in real time from a single interface. Connection to sales channels is simplified and no longer a problem. This opens up a whole new world of possibilities, enabling unlimited sales strategies.
These time-saving, performance and productivity objectives have a strong impact on customer satisfaction, and enable us to offer a high-quality customer experience, with ultra-fast preparation and delivery times.
Are you about to implement or change an OMS? In this article, we’ll explain how to draw up a good set of specifications, and find the service provider best suited to your needs.
Define specifications to find the best OMS e commerce
To find THE software that will meet all your requirements, you need to draw up a set of specifications.
Directed by the project manager, the e-commerce specification involves the various departments of a company in order to decipher the precise needs of the OMS implementation or change project.
In concrete terms, it enables the client to let the project manager know what he expects of him during the project. It precisely describes the needs to be met by the service provider or tenderer, and organizes the relationship between the various players throughout the project. It is generally drawn up by the project manager, with the involvement of all the departments concerned by the implementation of the project (IT, customer relations, marketing, communications, etc.).
This will enable the service provider or in-house team responsible for carrying out the project to gain a better understanding of the project and its objectives, business needs, technical constraints and external dependencies. Finally, an implementation schedule will be detailed to frame the project over time and delimit everyone’s actions.
Drawing up these specifications is vital for an OMS e-commerce project, since it acts as a “construction diagram”. It will address the tool’s interfacing issues, i.e. its association with your sales sources, invoicing and accounting systems, as well as your WMS and TMS, if you already have them.
So the question arises: how do you draw up specifications that will enable you to find the OMS e-commerce of your dreams?
How do I get started? How do you set up an e-commerce order management system? How best to define your needs? Above all, what are the right questions to ask?
To find out why you should use OMS e-commerce, read our complete guide. And if you’re wondering which French marketplace to sell on in 2024, we’ve got all the answers in our dedicated resources.
Background – Presentation of the company and its activities
The first step in drawing up a relevant e-commerce specification for your project is to take stock of your current situation. In fact, by presenting your company in a general way, you enable candidates to understand its essence and its future prospects.
1- Is there an OMS in your company and are you satisfied with it?
- If not, take a look at your current methodology: how do you manage your orders and stock?
- If so, try to list its limitations and strengths.
2- Do you sell through multiple channels?
- If so, which ones?
- If not, are you considering it?
→ By doing so, you’ll be better able to define your number of monthly orders and therefore respond more specifically to sales sources.
3- Do you have billing and accounting management software?
- Is this software independent of your IT system or does it require connection to an OMS e commerce (such as Enterprise Resource Planning(ERP), Customer Relationship Management (CRM), etc.)?
4- What about your logistics?
- Have you internalized, outsourced or combined the two (hybrid logistics)?
→ Indeed, answering this question is crucial, because in the case of external or hybrid logistics, it’s crucial to ensure that the company preparing your parcels is capable of delivering on the promise of shipment. On the other hand, if your logistics are more internalized, we’ll be looking for an association with a WMS and a TMS to ensure their interfacing with your OMS e commerce.
5- Now it’s time to define the project’s challenges
- How does OMS e commerce fit into your company’s strategy?
- Would you like to diversify and limit technical risk?
- Do you want to limit the strategic risk (compensate your activity with other sales channels in case your sales drop on one of them)?
- Would you like to make your teams more comfortable and productive?
- Guaranteeing stable growth?
- Ensure profitability and improve efficiency, for example with better stock rotation?
- Adapting to market trends?
- Eliminate all manual data entry, which is time-consuming and error-prone.
6- Finally, define the general objectives to be met by your future OMS e commerce :
- Is it a question of…meeting a time-saving objective?
- Stock management issues (avoiding overselling of products, continuous visibility of cross-warehouse stocks and other storage locations, etc.)
- To manage your network or your distribution strategy?
- To have a systematic look at your stock value…?
All these issues form the common thread running through your company’s thinking, so that you can deploy the best possible e-commerce specifications.
Defining needs
Once you’ve defined your objectives, define your needs. The more precisely your needs are defined, the better the service provider will be able to respond to your call for tenders.
Among the needs you need to distinguish, start with functional requirements. This section should answer the following question: What functional requirements must the tool meet?
1- Functional requirements
- Centralize all orders in one database and/or unified interface. This step will enable you to carry out omnichannel sales, thanks to real-time centralization of all your orders on a single interface.
- Consolidate all physical stocks, virtualize them and share them across the distribution network. This will give you a centralized, real-time view of your inventories across your various warehouses, and enable you to arbitrate your storage strategy.
- You can then direct your orders to the appropriate warehouse using a rules engine (stock availability, distance from the customer, BtoB or BtoC shipments, etc.).
- Finally, you’ll be able to enable different types of players to share information with each other (end consumers, external service providers, etc.).
2- Operational requirements
But even if functional requirements are important, you mustn’t neglect the operational needs that will enable your company to define, in broad terms, how the tool should be implemented.
- Start by asking yourself what your training requirements are? The duration of training will depend on the context of your company, and in particular whether you outsource or insource your logistics.
- In addition, ask yourself what your requirements are in terms of support. Would you like the support of an e-commerce logistics expert in pre-production and/or during production?
3- Technical constraints
After defining your functional and operational requirements, define your technical constraints.
- The first question you’ll need to answer is whether you prefer software hosted on your information system (on Premise) or hosted by a third party (SaaS software).
- Next, we need to understand your safety requirements.
At the end of these issues is a final question:
- What are your requirements in terms of adaptability and upgradeability?
→ To answer them, try to determine the possibility of making specific requests to the product team or the possibility of asking for custom developments. In either case, it’s imperative that the solution keeps up the pace of innovation and novelty.
Conclusion:
Whether you want to implement OMS e commerce or change your existing system, it’s essential to take stock of your business, your objectives and your needs.
To carry out this assessment, we’ve discussed the questions to ask in order to draw up clear, precise and structured specifications. The more concise the specifications, the better the service providers will be able to provide you with precise answers that are, above all, adapted to your expectations.
For step-by-step guidance on how to draw up your specifications, or simply to challenge them, we’ve put together a white paper on the subject.
