Why omni-channel is so hard to deploy
Every direct-to-consumer business strives to serve its customers in a seamless way. In today's fast-paced world, customer expectations are set by the industry leaders. You cannot afford to ship your products slower than Amazon. You cannot keep your customers if your customer service is not as friendly as your competitor's. You cannot sell online if you don't offer return policies more generous than others. As industry leaders push for omnichannel capabilities, you will have no choice but to become an omnichannel business as well.
Everyone talks about omnichannel, yet few can offer a seamless experience to their customers. It is easier said than done. Imagine a company with e-commerce, retail, and call center channels. A customer may place an order online but prefer to pick it up in a nearby store. Another customer may call the call center to return their online purchase and place a replacement order. Your retail store associate may place an order to be shipped to a customer when the inventory is not available in the store. As you can imagine, the more channels you serve, the more complex these scenarios get.
The main reason why companies struggle with these scenarios is due to their system footprint. Most companies have separate e-commerce systems, retail POS systems, and call center systems. These systems must have near real-time visibility to the inventory and the order across the company. Let's review the three scenarios we mentioned above. For the first one, the e-commerce system should be aware of the retail inventory in the store and then be able to send a pickup order to the retail POS system. For the second scenario, the call center should have full access to e-commerce order history and be able to send an order to the distribution center for replacement. For the third one, retail POS should have visibility to the warehouse inventory and be able to drop a fulfillment order. The integration that is required to sync the orders and inventory would require an immense amount of work.
So far, we focused on the inventory and order, but the challenge is even bigger. To make omnichannel work, we must have the same product master, pricing, discount, promotions, charges like freight, etc. across retail, e-commerce, and call center. We need to tap into the same payment and tax calculation gateways. The problem gets even worse if the company has a wholesale business. Keeping up with the inventory that serves not only Direct to Consumer (D2C) but also Business to Business (B2B) channels becomes even more challenging.
Facing this massive amount of work, most companies take a shortcut. They deploy a best-of-breed Order Management System (OMS) that sit on top of all their systems and broker the orders. This is an integration heavy project with questionable results. You are introducing yet another OMS on top of your other OMSs that need to be fed constantly.
The true solution is a single platform that keeps track of all the orders and inventory across your supply chain and services all your B2B and D2C channels. There are no integrations, no inventory or order syncs, no concerns about pricing, promotions, discounts, charges, etc. You have a single OMS layer accessing a single inventory level that is serving all the orders all the time. If you can get there, you may be the one setting the next trend in your industry.
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My name is Cem and this has been another gem.
