Practice what you preach with Order Orchestration
- Prabal Laad
Practice what you preach with Order Orchestration
Much of supply chain success comes down to fulfilling the Promise in an orderly manner. Organisations that proactively keep customers informed about the order statuses and provide alternate strategies if necessary, clearly standout from the ones that just preach.
In our previous blog on “Delivering the Supply Chain Promise”, we spoke about enabling businesses to make the right promise to customers across all channels by having a single view of stock that is Available-To-Promise. This single view needs to be accessible to all sales and distribution channels like eCommerce, Call Centre and In Stores etc.
Practising what you preach, in this context, refers to people and systems that fulfil the customer’s promise. In a fulfilment context speed and precision are key to success.
However, challenges exist due to multiple systems, multiple actors in the process, complex architectures and in some cases ad hoc technology decisions that further increase complexity.
In a recent conversation with a prospective client, we found that they had spent several years refining (customising) their OM and ATP in a monolith system, but were not fit for purpose to meet the expanding omni-channel requirement. We believe there are several such cases where business leaders feel stuck and cannot respond to market changes.
The gap needs a centralised system that can manage fulfilment of orders and keep stakeholders up to date on the demand order statuses. Such a system needs to be easily accessible across devices and platforms. It should also be ever-evolving as per global supply chain standards and ways of working.
Oracle’s Order Orchestration offering plugs this gap. It’s a comprehensive approach towards systematic and enterprise-wide order fulfilment. It can glue together different upstream order capture channels with multiple downstream fulfilment systems like Warehouse Management and Transportation Planning. This offering ensures a single view of order statuses across the organisation and since it’s deployed on the cloud, it can be easily accessed from different user devices.
The Orchestration framework has been designed and built to integrate with third-party systems like order capture, warehouse, transportation planning, and receivables to help you manage the complete order lifecycle.
You can also consider this as a risk mitigation strategy when you are thinking about transformation and use Orchestration as an application that helps in replacing existing patterns and establishing new ones.
Oracle has built-in modern capabilities such as jeopardy management, fulfilment schedules, and a meaningful collection of analytics dashboards enabling the users to track each step of order.
Hence, organisations can communicate with their customers in case of order delays, expected timelines, early dispatches etc. This, in turn, improves organisation OTIF (on time in full) and NPS (net promoter scores) rapidly.
Supply Chain business rules can easily be applied to order orchestration to implement best practices such as just-in-time delivery and fast inventory turn around to name a few.
As part of fulfilment, orchestration first transforms orders captured from various sources (online and offline). This results in order lines being transformed into fulfilment lines, each of which may need to be orchestrated, tracked, and fulfilled.
For example, an order for a laptop may be transformed into multiple fulfilment lines, one for each of the components of the laptop – charger, mouse, laptop bag etc. Organisations can write transformation rules based on certain conditions and order capture attributes.
For Example, when placing an order, if the customer has requested the sales agent that the item be shipped on the current date, then the Shipping Priority for such orders should be set as ‘High’. This rule will ensure that the order is prioritised in the warehouse.
Order Orchestration can then track the status of delivery of each of the fulfilment lines and accordingly update source system
In summary, Oracle Orchestration offering is well equipped, adaptive and flexible enough to meet requirements of different businesses. It will give your organisations the power to stay several steps ahead of surprises during the order fulfilment process as well as implement supply chain efficiencies to keep costs low. Hence, enabling you to practice what you preach.
Request for services
Find out more about how we can help your organisation navigate its next. Let us know your areas of interest so that we can serve you better.
