Electronic Order Management: Scope and Challenges of Implementing an Order Management System

An Electronic Order Management system is meant to eliminate delays, errors and costs associated with manual order management processes. Automating order generation, sending, receiving and acknowledging of orders can cut administration costs, reduce overheads and improve supply chain efficiency.
Incompatible ERP/Inventory management systems at buyer and vendor facilities is the first electronic order management challenge to tackle. An on demand web order management solution can sidestep incompatibilities of enterprise systems.
A hosted order management software or order management service allows sending and receiving data with a standard web browser and allows retrieving data in popular formats like XML, CSV or spreadsheets. On demand order management service takes data in any format and delivers it in real time to relevant persons in any format they require. Thus both the supplier and buyer can benefit from real time communication, even while not waiting for emails, phone calls or faxes.
Disconnected enterprise systems create data redundancy, errors and can lead to costly business inefficiencies. Poor coordination between enterprise systems leads to flawed production plans, increased supply chain pressure and poor customer service. Lack of visibility of orders, schedules and shipments can lead to costly administrative decision making processes.
An on demand order management service facilitates single point availability of total supply chain information in real time. This can lead to better coordination in the whole supply chain and overall time and cost savings.
Stock outs, expedited orders and bloated inventory are better avoided with proper order management process. The supplier also needs to have significant visibility into supply chain status and inventory status at customer level. This facilitates accurate demand forecasts based on customer inventory data.
Better planning can reduce instances of costly demand-supply mismatches. Planning business processes like customer order management and preparing for change order management gets easier with real time access to up to minute inventory data that foretells supply demand. This puts more control and responsibility on the suppliers and buyers can avoid labour intensive purchasing processes. On demand order management solution is configured to handle end-to-end order management workflows, purchase orders, advance ship notices, receipts and invoices.
Differences in procurement demand by different departments of same organization coupled with disconnected ERP systems add up procurement costs for the whole organization. Configure business rules for individual procurement processes and let the order management service take over the processes based on min-max settings.
Implementation of On-Demand Order Management System
On demand order management system is hosted order management solution that requires no additional IT infrastructure investment by either parties supplier and buyer. The order management solution provider charts out a well laid out implementation plan after identifying existing business challenges and possible cost/time savings of implementing a web order management solution. On demand electronic order management solution requires the business to pay only monthly subscriptions charges. No hefty licensing or upkeep costs. Employees can be trained on the system in less than four hours. Implementation takes less than six weeks and most of the time is utilized for uploading the data to a centralised location, defining business goals and testing the effectiveness of deployment.
For more resources about supply chain management software or even about supply chain management solution please review http://www.supplychainconnect.com



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