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Order Management has come a long way from the golden age of catalogers.  Back in the 1980’s, pre-Internet, there were two sales channels catalogers needed to worry about: the phone and mail-in orders.  Today, order management systems (OMS) need to work with every retail channel, or omnichannel, in order to be the central repository for all customer purchases, not just orders.  This requirement has been propelled by growing consumer expectations generated by a paradigm shift in the way they shop.  In addition, retail executives are looking for the OMS to reduce the number of systems necessary to manage orders, inventory, products and customer information. The Omnichannel Opportunity Omnichannel is now a reality as many retailers have started initiatives to unify their sales channels for optimizing the customer experience.  Consumer facing sales channels such as the web, call center and store-systems must all have access to the same retail data for shopping and service consistency.  Across many retail verticals, it has become important to have the ability to view inventory values across different stores or even warehouses to get the right

Omnichannel may be the latest buzzword, but it’s more than just a passing fad.  Omnichannel technology is the infrastructure that enables retailers and online merchants to give today's customer the shop-anywhere, ship-anywhere, pick-up or return anywhere behavior they demand. The previous generation of technology that many of today’s businesses rely on consists of numerous disparate systems that were not designed to operate together.  Today’s leading edge retailers and online trend-setters have replaced those systems with omnichannel-capable new systems.  Now you need to do the same thing to remain competitive – but how? Step one is to recognize that while omnichannel is complicated it still relies on the same principles that have built your business – satisfying your customer’s needs.  You don’t have to reinvent your business.  You have to adapt it to the shopping behavior of today’s customer. This requires sponsorship and ownership from the top of the organization – the owner, president, board of directors, etc. Step two is to recognize that the key to omnichannel success is that your sales and fulfillment technology infrastructure needs to have enterprise-wide

Today, retail executives struggle with omnichannel demands and expectations. According to a report from Retail Dive, only "21 percent of retail executives are more confident now than a year ago about their company’s ability to deliver omnichannel services". The challenge of implementing omnichannel capabilities is so hard for many reasons. The shop-anywhere, pick-up anywhere, ship anywhere, return anywhere expectations of today’s shopper drives demands on the infrastructure of retailers and ecommerce merchants like never before. Here are just a few of the challenges facing today’s mid-sized retailers and ecommerce merchants: Technology Retailers and merchants need to get different systems that were designed to operate autonomously to now interact seamlessly, as if they were one comprehensive system. Examples are many, such as warehouse management systems (WMS), designed to manage and track product procurement, receipt, storage fulfillment and shipping now needing to interact with mobile point-of-sale (POS) systems. This type of integration was never needed in the past. The POS only needed to manage the products physically present in one particular retail location, and manage the sale transaction and process the payment for