Online order management and order fulfillment - point of purchase
Proper online order management is one, if not THE most important components for success in business today. Your software needs to be well written and adaptable to changing business needs. Just as important is how well your point of purchase print supplier manages this data. One point of purchase order for printed materials can have thousands of drop ships and hundreds of combinations, so you better have a someone who knows how to effectively take and deliver your order.
I am a software architect at Serigraph and most of my time is developing new faster ways to do the following:
1. Take orders - web based mostly - There seem to be as many ways to take orders as there are grains of sand on the beach. Every business is different and has its own ideas on what is important, so it is important for the software to be very easily adaptable to the rules of businesses. It must be easy to use, fast, and contain the data that will help the business in analysis phase.
2. Organize orders - you need this in an order system to be efficient - organizing can be by location by configuration or by customer ( lots more as well, but these seem to be the most common).
3. Change management – the most efficient order taking system can be a real dog if you do not give your customers the opportunity to make changes or delete orders entirely.
4. Billing - taking orders is great but if you don't have an efficient way of interfacing your orders with your company billing system you will quickly anger the gods.
5. Analyze Orders - having the ability to take snapshots of orders and make decisions is a vital part of an system, without it you will be guessing ( and probably wrongly so )
I remember 20 years ago when a good friend of mine said: "Our ordering system now does everything we need" I laughed at him... we have been adding and enhancing the process every year since then, and I do not see an end in sight because business and technology are always changing.
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