Lightwell Business Technology Blog

For retailers as well as B2B companies, order fulfillment plays a major role in both customer satisfaction and profitability. Customers expect flawless, fast order fulfillment across all channels.  While customer-centric companies work hard to meet these expectations, it can be very expensive to do so.

As customers purchase from your company across multiple channels—via the Web, mobile apps, kiosks, marketplaces, retail locations, and even catalog and telephone orders—you’ll want capabilities like centralized order orchestration, ship from store, drop ship, and real-time inventory visibility. These order management capabilities work together to meet customers’ expectations seamless, fast and error-free order fulfillment.

However, these capabilities alone don’t ensure companies can do so profitably.  In fact, while many CEOs have identified omnichannel commerce as a top priority, the IBM Consumer Expectations Study found that it could cost up to three times more to serve omnichannel customers.

Every channel adds complexity to the order fulfillment process. In addition, there’s pressure from customers and competitors to same-day or two-day shipping, making it even more critical to leverage modern technologies to fulfill orders in the most efficient, cost-effective way possible. In fact, the IBM study found that 72 percent of consumersconsider two-day or less shipping as a factor when making a purchase.

On top of using an omnichannel order management system, companies are now adopting solutions that can apply human reasoning and cognitive capabilities to order fulfillment. As a result, they’re able to meet or exceed customer expectations while reducing their fulfillment costs. Let’s take a closer look.

File transfers between an organization, its business partners, and customers can be fraught with challenges.

Today, organizations must support ever-increasing file sizes, types, volumes, and user numbers under severe budget constraints. Also, they must address extensive security requirements and compliance challenges, meet strict SLAs, and support the rapidly-changing needs of the business.

In the past, these challenges may have been viewed as technical problems, approached with an assortment of technologies and file transfer methods—including “free” technology such as FTP.  However, to keep pace with the evolving needs of the business, protect a wide variety of data, and mitigate risk inside and outside the enterprise, organizations have realized the need for enterprise-class managed file transfer solutions. 

In this post, I’ll explore these common challenges and the vital role these solutions play in overcoming them.

How Simplifying Trading Partner Onboarding Generates Many Surprising Competitive Advantages

The average enterprise’s B2B trading community includes hundreds of trading partners and requires IT support for managing a wide variety of connections, protocols, and formats. Unfortunately, when it comes to setting up and managing trading partners, many companies are still hobbling along with cumbersome, error-prone manual processes.

If you aren’t already leveraging cognitive technologies and artificial intelligence (AI) in your business network, you may be missing out on critical supply chain improvements.

Cognitive and AI systems use natural language processing and machine learning to understand, reason, learn about and analyze all types of data. Also, they can interact with users in a more natural, conversational manner.

For B2B networks and supply chains, these capabilities can be leveraged for a wide variety of improvements including:

• Providing greater visibility and insight—from high level to granular detail
• Enabling split-second decision making based on the best data available
• Increasing awareness of critical issues
• Suggesting the best courses of action 
• Fostering collaboration among departments and partners

With these capabilities like these, you can plan for (or avoid) disruptions, proactively handle potential issues with suppliers, and ensure you can meet or exceed customer expectations (among many other benefits). Let’s take a closer look at some of the AI and cognitive capabilities available for B2B operations and supply chains today.

If you build the API, they will come…and then what? Building an API doesn’t stop at releasing the API. While an API is not a piece of software in the traditional sense, API management is critical to ensure that it is helping your organization meet its intended goals.

An API needs the proper controls in place, as well as routine maintenance and monitoring to make sure it’s operating the way it was envisioned. Issues that crop up can be dealt with before they become big problems. Additionally, managing and monitoring the API can help determine ROI and provide valuable user information that helps your organization optimize the API for its audience.

According to an Enterprise Management Associates survey on the API economy, most organizations use API gateways and platforms as their primary methods of tracking API transactions. Additionally, almost half of the companies surveyed have created a dedicated API Manager role within the organization, often under the IT umbrella.

This has become necessary as most of the companies surveyed are delivering and managing dozens of APIs to both providers and consumers. 

The API process is a lifecycle, and that requires ongoing testing, upgrades, and post-deployment support, among other services.  Let’s explore some the basics around managing APIs.

Omnichannel commerce brings new challenges to order fulfillment. Think of all the channels your customers use to shop—your website, online marketplaces, stores, paging through a catalog, or calling your contact center.

Add in all your inventory locations—including DCs, warehouses, fulfillment partners, and retail locations—and you may run into difficulty fulfilling orders as flawlessly as customers expect. All the order touchpoints such as point-of-sale systems, contact centers, and e-commerce platforms need to sync with your order, inventory, warehouse, shipping, and reporting systems. Otherwise, orders may need to be canceled or delayed, which affects customer loyalty and chips away at profitability.

Flexibility is key when it comes to omnichannel order fulfillment and order management systems that enable it. Static business rules—such as a customer located in California should receive products from the nearest fulfillment center in Arizona— no longer makes sense when inventory is sourced from retail locations as well.  Now, you also need to consider the store inventory, as well as the demand for a product in that geographic area.

That same customer, located in Northern California, orders a popular product online that sells out quickly in the retail store in his area. Instead of shipping from the store in his area that has low inventory (and risking losing an in-store sale as a result of being out of stock), artificial intelligence can determine that it’s better to ship the product from a store in an area that isn’t experiencing the same level of demand.

Sound confusing? It can be. But this is the next generation of order management and fulfillment, which uses artificial intelligence and cognitive capabilities to determine the best source for items and ship them in the most profitable way possible. These capabilities can transform the way orders are fulfilled—reducing costs and increasing profitability, while ensuring customers are happy. Here are a few examples of how this works.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is no longer the province of science fiction: it’s here, and it can be leveraged by your supply chain to transform the way your company sources materials and delivers finished products.

For many companies, AI and cognitive computing are becoming necessities in their supply chain operations, as these capabilities can help them overcome significant barriers to success.

First, we collect a plethora of data in our supply chains, but often, we miss important opportunities for cost savings and efficiency because we aren’t using that data effectively. 

Globalization also presents new challenges to the supply chain. As companies continue to grow, they generate and collect even more data, implement more policies and processes, and add many new employees, suppliers, customers, and locations. Consequently, they struggle with analyzing all of this data, bringing new supply chain employees up to speed on policies and best practices, deciding what actions to take when issues arise, and getting relevant insights into the right hands at the right time. 

While AI and cognitive capabilities can help companies overcome these challenges and many others, they can also help companies improve—even transform—their supply chains. Let's explore how. 

Application programming interfaces (APIs) are changing the ways companies do business. From integrating deeply with legacy backend systems to pulling in new data sources, organizations are finding new uses for existing data—and with it, more opportunities for revenue.

As the Internet of Things (IoT), omnichannel strategy, and hybrid cloud continue to evolve, APIs will be the glue that holds systems together and the key that simultaneously unlocks the door to opportunity.

Many organizations are looking to APIs to solve their integration challenges and move toward a more digital organization. According to MuleSoft’s Connectivity Benchmark Report, 72 percent of enterprises already have an API strategy−and generating revenue is the top priority.  

As your organization moves forward with its own API strategy, it may help to draw inspiration from some of the most forward-thinking companies already leveraging APIs to better serve customers, employees, and partners—including the world’s most popular music streaming service, a logistics company that needed to serve a new market efficiently, and a retailer that needed to create better in-store and online experiences for customers.

It’s no secret that customers expect a seamless and personalized experience, whether interacting with a company via a mobile device, computer, in-store, or on the phone with a customer service representative.  As consumers (and B2B customers) ourselves, we have little—if any—patience for inconsistent information and impersonal interactions.   

This not only applies to our shopping and purchasing experiences, but to our post-purchase experience as well:  timeliness and accuracy of order status updates, if our order was delivered or available for pick up as promised, the quality of our interactions with representatives, and the ease of returning items.

Sounds obvious, but if you’re reading this blog post, you understand that meeting these expectations consistently is no small feat. Delivering flawless omnichannel shopping and post-purchase experiences can be exceedingly complex from technology, process, and training perspectives—especially for companies with multiple business models and brands, multiple marketplaces, a large number of items, and numerous store locations, warehouses, distribution centers, and fulfillment partners. 

An omnichannel order management system (OMS) can play an essential role in meeting these expectations.  Today’s sophisticated order management and fulfillment systems are capable of much more than capturing an order through and sending it to a back-end system for processing.  Some can meet a wide range of customer demands, orchestrate order fulfillment across channels, facilitate an experience that engenders customer loyalty, and assist in maximizing profits for the company as well. In addition, these systems can provide critical business data to better inform decisions surrounding merchandising, returns, inventory, marketing, and other functions. 

Most likely, if you are selling products online, you are already employing some sort of an order management system. It might be part of your ecommerce platform, ERP, or CRM system—or perhaps a home-grown, proprietary solution. However, as you may have recognized, these systems often fall short of meeting customer expectations.

If this is the case—and you want to improve the customer experience by leaps and bounds—consider some of the most critical components of an omnichannel order management system as you evaluate your options.  Here are some questions you should be asking.