IBM Sterling Order Management System Standard Edition

IBM Sterling® Order Management System Standard Edition, formerly IBM Sterling Order Management System Service, is a package of features, services, and add-on options for the organization that requires a full-featured, omnichannel order management cloud service.

Features

  • Order Orchestration

    Aggregates, manages and monitors orders from all channels allowing complex multi-level order orchestration with ability to detect and escalate problem situations. Intelligent sourcing engine coordinates fulfillment across multiple participants from the extended enterprise. Provides a single order repository to modify, cancel, track, and monitor the order lifecycle.

  • Inventory Visibility

    Consolidates inventory information from multiple systems, generating a single view of multiple demand and supply types. Matches demand and supply types using business rules that understand inventory segmentation, inbound inventory, and monitoring inventory thresholds and velocity of inventory movement. Provides role-specific views of inventory.

  • Scheduling Optimization

    Provides configurable rules to control the processing of the order taking into consideration, advanced optimization rules, multi-level order relationships, supply and resource rules, product and relationship rules and client's business rules and shipping preferences.

  • Reverse Logistics

    Links multiple return or repair requests to original sales orders, to enable repair lifecycle tracking. Tracks reverse inventory back to the appropriate location, based upon business rules.

  • Operational Reporting

    Provides reporting capabilities against the transactional Cloud Service data for day to day operations using IBM Cognos Analytics on Cloud.

  • Order Hub

    Provides a user interface that fulfillment and order management professionals can use to manage their fulfillment network. You can use Order Hub to view extensive details about nodes and orders and perform various actions such as change the node capacity and reassign pending order releases to other available nodes. You can also view details about items and SKUs and perform various inventory actions such as move inventory across nodes, adjust safe stock, and set fulfillment options.

Solution details

IBM Sterling Order Management System Standard Edition, formerly Sterling™ Order Management System Service, is a full-featured, omnichannel product. IBM Sterling Order Management System Standard Edition cloud service product is designed to enable intelligent matching of internal and external sources of supply and demand while adhering to the organization's business rules. The product consolidates orders across multiple channels to provide a single view of demand, inventory, and supply across global networks through supplier collaboration. IBM Sterling Order Management System Standard Edition can integrate with warehouse, financial, tax, payment, and other internal and external processes.

Included in IBM Sterling Order Management System Standard Edition:
  • Product features. A base set of functional capabilities for order orchestration, inventory visibility, order scheduling optimization, reverse logistics to link returns or repair requests to orders, and advanced order search and archival.
  • Service features. A set of features for four software as a service (SaaS) environments (production, preproduction, test, and integration), which include service requests, data storage options, and disaster recovery.
  • Add-ons for product and service features. Add-ons allow organizations to tailor IBM Sterling Order Management System Standard Edition to meet their specific implementation requirements.

Tools and capabilities

IBM Sterling Order Management System has the following tools and capabilities:
  • IBM® UrbanCode® Deploy Selfserv tool: This tool is set up and configured by IBM to enable you to complete administrative tasks and deploy changes for your IBM Sterling Order Management System environment, in a self-service manner (without the need to open service requests with IBM).
  • Self Service: Self Service is set up and configured by IBM. It provides your organization's administrators and developers with a web-based user interface, which they can use to complete various tasks for administering, troubleshooting, and updating your environments.
  • Developer toolkit: Using the developer toolkit, you can set up an IBM Sterling Order Management System environment on your local machine with a one-to-one mapping between your local machine contents and your IBM Cloud environment. You can use this developer toolkit environment to create and test custom extensions for your applications, before you package and deploy your extensions into your cloud environments.
  • Configuration deployment tool: Is a utility that you can use to extract the configuration data from one environment in the form of XMLs and import this data into another environment.
  • IBM Sterling Order Management System supports integration with external systems using IBM MQ and RESTful APIs.

Environments

Category Standard product includes
Production environment
  • An environment where the final application is deployed and service is made available to the user.
  • This environment has 24 x 7 IBM Support after the site is live.
Preproduction environment
  • An environment where your operations team or System Integrator does a final validation before deployment to production.
  • The client is responsible for performance testing.
Quality Assurance environment
  • An environment where you and your implementation team perform quality assurance testing and user acceptance testing (“UAT”).
  • Additionally, you and your implementation team perform integration and scalability tests in this environment.
Development environment
  • An environment where your implementation team installs deployable artifacts and executes module testing.
  • Supports developer integration testing.
Master Configuration environment
  • An environment where all the configuration necessary for IBM Sterling Order Management System is available. Configuration data can be extracted from this environment and imported into higher or lower environments.

Security

IBM Sterling Order Management System service follows IBM's data security and privacy principles for IBM SaaS which are available at http://www.ibm.com/cloud/data-security and any additional terms provided in this section. Any change to IBM's data security and privacy principles will not degrade the security of the IBM Sterling Order Management System service.
  • Security Features and Responsibilities

    The IBM Sterling Order Management System service implements the following security features:

    The IBM Sterling Order Management System service does encrypt content during data transmission between the IBM network and the endpoint networks or machines depending on the protocol used. IBM recommends, but does not require, that the data is protected through file-level encryption while at rest, unless it contains Personally Identifiable Information (PII), in which case it must be encrypted. You are responsible for ensuring transfer of content is using a secure protocol (as an example SFTP) while transmitting data.

  • Payment Card Industry (PCI) Account Data

    The IBM Sterling Order Management System service is not intended for storage, transmission or processing of PCI Account Data. To limit the risk of exposure, PCI Account Data should be re-directed, punched out using an iFrame, or other technology which passes the PCI Account Data from the Client's browser directly to the PCI compliant payment provider.

    If necessary, the IBM Sterling Order Management System service will permit PCI Account Data to traverse the network and be processed on server images within the DMZ and Application tier. The PCI Account Data may be processed in memory and forwarded to your payment provider, but is not permitted to be transferred to the database, or written to any file system on any device with the IBM Sterling Order Management System service.

    IBM will comply, for the duration of the subscription, with the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard (PCI DSS) for those controls that are managed by the IBM Sterling Order Management System service. The applicable controls will be documented through a Self-Assessment Questionnaire for Merchants Version D (SAQ D), which contains an Attestation of Compliance (AOC), or through an appropriate reporting method as specified by the PCI DSS.

Backup and disaster recovery

A daily backup of database and agent/application server data is taken and retained as per IBM policy.

Disaster recovery is a standard process executed to ensure continued production traffic in the unlikely event of a disaster. It is available with the following Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) options:
  • The service level objective (SLO) for business continuation that is offered for IBM Sterling Order Management System is 4 hours for Recovery Point Objective (RPO) and 8 hours for Recovery Time Objective (RTO).
  • Additionally, if you purchase options for the SLO improvement, the expected RPO is 2 hours and RTO is within 4 hours.

Monitoring

IBM provides the following monitoring designed to assess the IBM Sterling Order Management System service from the physical hardware's health to the performance of the service:
  • Cloud Infrastructure Monitoring

    Monitors the health and well-being of the cloud infrastructure platform

  • Application Monitoring

    Monitors the health and well-being of the Application

  • Synthetic Monitoring

    "Simulated user click" to monitor the health and well-being of Extensions running in conjunction with the Application.

Maintenance windows

The service has a weekly scheduled maintenance window that is taken as needed for any infrastructure and application updates. You can use maintenance windows, as needed and when available, for implementing new business release updates to the solution. A daily processing window is available for processing larger customer-specific data feeds during periods of low activity on the solution.

Infrastructure and support

Case management is available for support requests. IBM Sterling Order Management System Software Support engages the appropriate implementation team for any issues with customizations.

Other related solution features

  • Legacy platformConfigure, Price, Quote Service

    Configure, Price, Quote Service, simplifies challenging selling processes by automating the configuration, pricing and quoting of complex products, services, and bundles. This streamlined sales process guides customers, sales teams, call center representatives and partners in selecting and validating the right products and services.

  • IBM Sterling Call Center Service

    IBM Sterling Call Center Service, offers better customer service and support experience. The customer service representative (CSR) can use the same buying experience that customers use to provide customers with assistance for site activities, for example, assist customers to manage their cart content and assist with the checkout process. As a part of the buying experience, the CSR can look up customer accounts and orders, and help customers with their account management.

For more information

To learn more about the IBM Sterling Order Management System Standard Edition, contact your IBM sales representative.