To build up a successful e-tailing business, it’s crucial for retailers to pick up the right order management solution, dealing orders across offline and online channels.
However, the situation could be much more complicated in the real world.
A highly automated order managing process could significantly improve the workflow of the e-tailing business (buy-side and sell-side) regarding both the accuracy aspect and efficiency aspect.
Just imagine this, a retailer is operating multiple online stores for its different brands, brands are being managed independently, without an integrated OMS solution, the way to simultaneously deal with a large amount of separated order data could be quite a problem.
It might need an additional manual operation to collect all the information into one place, which obviously will create tons of unnecessary workloads for the retailer and turn out the working efficiency could be reduced.
Therefore, the very core-question is what should we do for handling this situation?
I think you’ve noticed a crucial keyword, an integrated OMS system.
What is an integrated OMS system?
In nowadays market, there are certain low level and basic OMS systems that are designed specifically for small businesses, mainly to help them organize and streamline the order fulfillment process and deal with some fundamental transactions, which is more than enough because of their overall business scale and limited budget.
But a good order management system goes far deeper.
For those big players in the market, a professional OMS system (like OMS.Pro) with advanced features could be extremely useful and indispensable. The integration capacity should be the outstanding one among those advanced features.
An integrated OMS system enables to be integrated with retailers’ various external and internal systems, such as ERP, CRM, POS, Logistics, and so on, empowering retailers to:
• Manage their customer information and interactions
• Access accounting data
• Customize their Point-Of-Sales (POS)
• Receive order information across different channels
• Receive order information across multiple brands’ online stores
• Better inventory management
All by operating just one single OMS system.
Let’s read the story of L’Oreal Australia
See how L’Oreal Australia solve their order management problem by working with RCI Global Services.
Background
Customers, at the time, were no longer just satisfied with buying what they want but started to significantly value the overall shopping experience, being eager to obtain more accesses to reach their desired products and be able to seamlessly transition from one channel to the next with simple moves.
In 2015, L’Oreal Australia sensed the trend of drastic change for the traditional retail landscape and smelled the opportunity from the e-tailing business, deciding to launch their very first eCommerce store for their three major brands, Lancome, Kiehl’s, and Clarisonic, to further meet their customers’ expectation and enhance the overall shopping experience across the online and offline channels.
Since it was a crucial step for L’Oreal’s future business growth, they needed to make sure the partners they’re going to work with were professional and reliable enough.
Salesforce was one of the essential components in their e-tailing journey, offering Salesforce Commerce Cloud eCommerce solution, and Bluecom was being selected to be responsible for the whole back-end system integration with SFCC.
Challenge Appearing
However, during the eCommerce store launching project, L’Oreal was facing a serious challenge, which is lacking the right order management system for their eCommerce store.
Since those three brands owned by L’Oreal group, Lancome, Kiehl’s, and Clarisonic, were being independently operated, there could be huge differences from each other regarding the internal systems, the inventory management, the fulfillment way, and so on.
Only implementing an advance integrated OMS system could truly help L’Oreal develop a solid e-tailing business, which’s able to simultaneously manage multi-brands within the same platform in real-time online orders for Australia markets and be seamlessly integrated with SFCC, ERP, Logistic, POS, CRM system.
At the time, the eCommerce store was expected to be launched within 4 months, quite a tight schedule, so L’Oreal Australia urgently needed to find a partner that could not only offer the right OMS solution and but also carry out the whole implementation in a challenging timeline.
The Solution from RCI Global Services
RCI Global Services were there bringing one of the most advanced OMS solutions in the market at the time, called Retail Pro OMS solution holding various exciting features, including:
• Order management (Sales Order, Cancel, Return, Exchange)
• Customer management
• Product & Price management
• Inventory Management
• Fully-integrated approach
Designed for duly managing huge numbers of orders in real-time, Retail Pro OMS was the one that could be fully integrated with L’Oreal AU ecosystem (SAP, Salesforce, CRM, Auspost) and create a centralize integration hub to orchestrate their supply chain to receive orders from various channels and eCommerce stores, providing you 360 view of the customer and order journey, from initial information gathering to product return & cancellations.
By connecting and overlapping each channels’ and stores’ data for a seamless view of the customer purchasing behavior, it certainly enabled L’Oreal to handle orders from their 3 different brands at the same time.
Possessing strong knowledge of retail-focused OMS system and experience development team for system integration, RCI Global Services left a great positive impression to L’Oreal Australia.
Once L’Oreal Australia came on board RCI Global Services immediately started a comprehensive evaluation of the OMS implementation project and then offered a detailed implementation schedule, scopes including:
• Consulting business requirement
• OMS implementation
• Data migration
• Develop customization for L’Oreal Australia market
• Develop integration with external and internal systems
• Thorough system testing
and confirmed the best project team arrangement, including 1 project manager, 1 business analysis, 3 developers, and 1 quality assurance, to ensure the first eCommerce store of L’Oreal Australia could be successfully launched without any delay.
Result
After 4 months of hard-working, RCI Global Services have delivered the shared OMS solution fully integrated with SFCC for 3 simultaneous brands (Lancome, Kiehl’s, and Clarisonic) of L’Oreal Australia eCommerce websites.
With the powerful OMS solution, their eCommerce store now could manage all aspects of e-tailing business, such as order processing, support center management, customer relationship management, inventory management, and so on.
Through applying the localization design of the Retail Pro OMS for the Australia market, L’Oreal is able to easily adapt the buying behavior of local customers and the complex market environment of Australia, avoiding some unwanted conflict.
A fully integrated OMS makes their 3 brands’ e-tailing business run smoothly and efficiently by automating every step possible and help them keep all valuable transaction data and the processes regarding both buy-side and sell-side in one unified system.
L’Oreal Australia is greatly satisfied with the result and thrilling to see their dream come true for the first eCommerce website with SFCC, which is a huge step for their future business growth in the Australia market.
There is no doubt that L’Oreal Australia starts to consider RCI Global Services part of the crucial component in their e-tailing journey and plan to deploy the Retail Pro OMS solution for their other brands in Australia in near future.