Maximizing Efficiency with an Order Management Systems in a Multibrand Context

If retailers want to impress their customers, they should offer them different shopping channels, link them and create a consistent brand experience. After all, customers want to be able to shop conveniently anywhere - whether in a store, online shop, or on social media - quickly access information about products, prices, their availabilities, and pick up the products at their convenience, have them delivered, and return them anywhere. In order to do so, retailers have to serve multiple sales channels consistently, which leads to different challenges. In this blogpost, I want to show you how the fulfillmenttools solution works in a complex multibrand context, using the example of a fashion customer selling through multiple branded webshops, brick and mortar stores and marketplaces in various? international markets.?

Order management for a multibrand retailer

Especially for a customer with different brands, stores, webshops and marketplaces, inventory management is an important topic. A lack of inventory transparency and visibility can lead to overselling, which causes post sales cancellations and reduces your customer satisfaction. Especially out of stock situations in warehouses for seasonal articles are painful, as you might have untapped inventory levels waiting in your physical stores. To avoid this scenario and to meet customer demands, one strategy is to include retail stores in the fulfillment network in order to be able to meet customer demands even if warehouses are out of stock of a certain item. To manage this complexity, especially if you are selling your products through different brands in various countries, an Order Management System is needed to process orders in the best possible way based on the individual goals.

Getting the fulfillment network omnichannel ready

In our customer’s case, brick-and-mortar stores were included in the fulfillment network alongside traditional warehouses, in order to use them as small shipping warehouses to fulfill online orders. This ensures flexibility in the fulfillment processes of the eCommerce business as well as an optimized use of resources and stock and an increased service level for customers. The fulfillment flexibility provided the foundation for a scaling eCommerce.

Therefore, we first of all enabled the physical brick and mortar stores to become omnichannel ready. We started with a small scope in the first country to select a certain set of retail stores which should be included in the network, based on the stores’ size, staff workload and geographical factors. After that, we introduced our simple and intuitive mobile store-fulfillment application to the staff on-site to enable them to pick, pack and ship online and Click & Collect orders from their stores.

Following, we created a view on the customer’s network’s inventory by connecting their inventory of warehouses, 3PLs and stores for all channels to the fulfillmenttools system. Thanks to the inventory visibility throughout the whole network, the customer can now optimize and individualize their order routing and accelerate operational processes, improve inventory accuracy in the webshop and check stock availability based on real-time data. This helps our customer to avoid overstock and out-of-stock, to distribute stock according to demands and to analyze historical data for optimized planning. All of this led to successful network activation of our customer and reduced post sales cancellations by using previously untapped inventory levels.

Automation of order processing

Further, with our Distributed Order Management System (DOMS), we enable our customer to process orders in the best possible way based on their individual goals. The DOMS automates the order process by selecting the best location of fulfillment, based on inventory levels, capacities and multi-brand-specific needs that our customer defined.?

One of our customer’s primary goals is to reduce long, environment unfriendly and cost intensive cross-border shipments especially to non-EU markets. Therefore, we source orders from non-EU countries differently to those of EU countries, especially if no warehouse is present in the given country.

For example, based on our new setup, orders placed from Norwegian customers were no longer shipped from the customer’s mainland European warehouse but from one of their various stores in the country if the stock was available. This benefits the customer due to shorter time to value and reduced transportation costs. Also, we removed the customs clarification as we were shipping from stores within the country. Hence, we assessed each countries’ and brand’s requirements and defined the order routing configuration correspondingly. Further, we improved staff utilization in the stores, while simultaneously not increasing their costs, as we have used already existing stores and resources. The employees working in the stores process online orders - especially during non-peak times in the mornings, during the week with little traffic in the stores.

With every new country that we rolled-out to, our client is able to ship orders that previously would have been canceled due to out of stock in their warehouse by using previously untapped inventory and staff from existing stores. We therefore incrementally increased our customers' sales numbers and improved their margin.

Based on the availability of store and warehouse capacities as well as geographical distance, our customer is now able to find the best location to fulfill each order.

Together we therefore created transparency on their global inventory and the end-customer’s order status.

The benefits of implementing fulfillmenttools?

Successfully activating the fulfillment network and implementing our DOMS, Inventory Management and Store-Fulfillment App brought many benefits for our customer.

Reduced costs: By reducing cross-border shipments and utilizing the capacities in the brick and mortar store, our customer is able to reduce their costs.

Increased sales: Through more sales channels, fewer out-of-stocks and higher customer lifetime value, our customer is able to generate additional revenue.

Increased end-consumer satisfaction: The digital process leads to faster and more reliable fulfillment for the end-consumers. Also, with full inventory visibility of the entire network our customer can inform their consumers about availability and delivery times. This enhances the consumer’s satisfaction.

Automated processes: Our customer’s goal was to optimize fulfillment processes in order to fulfill the wishes of as many consumers as possible in the shortest possible time and the most efficient way. Digital and automated processes support simplified and accelerated order processing and thus also enable cost savings.