There are lot of manufacturing facilities, multiple retail, different finance and procurement centres in different countries, each of these units using myriad custom applications for Supply Chain and each application talks to every application. This is the (in)famous Spaghetti model where the logic on which applications must communicate is hard coded with in each application and this is logic is not configurable. If this sounds familiar, then please read on.
During inception, the organizations chose for one or few application that suite most of their need. But as the organization expands and with mergers and acquisitions, each organization brings its own home grown application. By the time the organization is mature in expansion into a conglomerate, the IT landscape is often a spaghetti of applications.
The resolution to this situation comes in the form of Order Management Cloud (OMC). The functionality called 'Distributed Order Orchestration' in Order management cloud helps in end to end integration between order entry and fulfilment applications. Below are few key features of OMC.
Interfacing the sales orders: The orders are captured via multiple retain channels like in-store, call centre, ecommerce web site, by engineer during after sales service, mobile application, internal ordering between different entities of the business etc. But these orders can be routed to OMC and created as a Sales order by invoking the seeded order creation web service. The incoming order payload can have different fields populated by order entry system. But as long as mandatory values are present, a sales order can be easily created.
Enriching the sales orders: The SO, so created, may need to have different warehouses where the SO is fulfilled, different booking Business unit based on the geography of the customer, different product needs to be added to the SO based on incoming attributes, can have different shipment method or priority etc. Any transformation on the SO is possible via the pre, product and post transformation rules. To the delight of the IT team, these rules can be built on a visual builder making maintainability of these rules easy
Fulfilment activities made easy: These enriched sales orders are now ready for fulfilment via OMC itself or can be interfaced to different legacy applications for different tasks. For example, manufacturing activity can be fulfilled and interfaced to MES application while a pick and ship can be routed to a WMS application. The invoicing can happen a completely different finance application. All this is possible by configuring the external routing rules and web service connectors for these application. OMC will create a payload of the SO and publish it to these connectors, record the acknowledgement and also the fulfilment of the tasks in legacy applications
Provide complete visibility to customer: As a customer may be curious to know the details of his / her order, OMC can be configured to send a status back at specific intervals. For example, when SO is created in OMC, manufacturing is complete, SO is picked, SO is shipped etc. From IT point of view, this is (again, as you guessed) configurable. The web service connector can be configured for each of the order entry application and OMC will fire the status message to these connectors
Below diagram explains the order orchestration process flow
Picture 2 - How Order Orchestration works in Order Management Cloud
Varied business process: The business process may include progressing the sales order via a series of automated and manual steps. For example the SO will have to be automatically reserved, while the customer service team needs to check and update the SO with the customer before the item can be shipped out. Such different processes can be configured via order orchestration in OMC. The SO will be automatically reserved while it will wait for user inputs once the call to customer is made outside the system.
Changing customer needs: In this competitive world, being flexible to changing customer needs is paramount. But at the same time be cost effective. Order management cloud provides functionalities to control the customer change, cost each change and react to each of these changes in a different way suited for the business. The change order functionality can be easily leveraged
Picture 3 - Order orchestration via Order management Cloud
Gone are those days where IT application is just as transaction recording system. IT application is one of the main enabler and enhancer for each business. Order Management, being the revenue making and customer facing module, is truly more flexible to ensure that sales team can be more agile and proactive. So untangle the spaghetti model and route all orders to OMC and dive the fulfilment via simple transformation rules.
Order Management Cloud is implemented as the order routing application in an optical retail chain, operating globally, offering optician services, along with eyeglasses, contact lenses and hearing aids. There are 8000+ stores ordering items via 15+ retail applications and these orders are fulfilled via 10+ different specialised custom applications. With volumes of order line crossing 1 million a month, there is no room for error. While the implementation is still underway, benefits are reaped already by bringing all the routing logic centrally to Order Management cloud.
Sathya Narayanan.S
Lead Consultant
Infosys Limited