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Multi-channel order management for retail

Offer customers real flexibility

Over the years, technology has afforded retail customers with a range of options for purchasing products and services—and retailers have adopted these various channels to provide a convenient and satisfying customer experience. Your customers may order products and services on the web, in the store, by phone, through kiosks or even from your business partners. But providing the flexibility of a variety of purchasing options won’t lead to loyalty if your ordering process is disjointed and inconsistent. The multi-channel order management solution for retail from IBM can help you consolidate data to provide consistent service across channels. Offer your customers real flexibility to keep them coming back.

Access more information for better decision making

With our solution, you can give your customers the flexibility to shop and interact with your business through multiple channels without sacrificing convenience, continuity or consistency of the brand experience. We can help you aggregate information from multiple, disparate order and inventory management systems, pulling together data about current stock levels and orders, and proactively monitoring fulfillment processes.

All of this information is interconnected, providing customers with visibility into accurate stock levels across all sales channels, so they can make more intelligent purchasing decisions based on actual product availability. The solution can also provide customers with more visibility into order status after a purchase is made so they can track their order from the time they place it to the time it’s delivered.

In addition, the solution can enable your retail organization to improve inventory utilization by supplying you with the intelligence you need to tap into an array of fulfillment options throughout your retail network. By better understanding inventory levels, you can capture missed orders and improve order fill rates utilizing inventory across the entire network—from your warehouses to your stores to your suppliers and partners.

Streamline your order-to-fulfill processes

The multi-channel order management solution can enable your retail organization to:

• Give your customers the flexibility to shop and interact through multiple channels without sacrificing convenience, continuity or consistency of the brand experience.
• Gain seamless coordination of order-to-fulfill processes across sales channels.
• Get an accurate view of stock levels and order information at any customer touchpoint.
• Improve inventory utilization by employing the entire retail fulfillment network for more timely, cost-effective order fulfillment.

Benefit from market-leading technology

The multi-channel order management solution features market-leading order management applications from IBM® Business Partners combined with IBM hardware, software and services. Using our retail industry experience and order management and fulfillment process expertise, we can help you design and implement a solution that best meets your needs, with components such as:

• Order management applications from Manhattan Associates, Sterling Commerce and other IBM Business Partners.
• IBM WebSphere® Commerce software, which provides a powerful customer interaction platform for cross-channel and online commerce, supporting all business models.
• WebSphere MQ, the leading enterprise service bus messaging backbone, which can help integrate the solution with your existing systems and improve the flow of information across your organization.
• IBM Sales Center for WebSphere Commerce, which builds on the catalog, order management, promotions and merchandising capabilities of WebSphere Commerce to give your contact center representatives greater functionality for better customer service.
• IBM Global Business Services, including implementation and integration services based on best practices from our years of experience in the retail industry.

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