9 advantages of an order management system

Grasping the basics of order management

If you are unsure of what order management exactly entails, it covers the process that begins when a customer places an order, through to picking, packing and delivery. The process requires warehouse staff, managers and 3PLs to work together to ensure the order is fulfilled as quickly and accurately as possible.

Software plays a critical role in the order management process, allowing ecommerce businesses to track progress as well as automate and simplify manual tasks like printing labels, selecting couriers, handling transactions and managing customer data.

An order management system gives online retailers and 3PLs full visibility and control over the end-to-end fulfilment process, allowing them to plan ahead and spot issues before they arise. It helps businesses quickly adapt to changing customer demands and streamlines processes to ensure consistent and timely service.

How can an order management system enhance your business?

Time savings and cost minimisation are essential for online retailers and 3PLs to satisfy the increasing expectations of today’s customer. This is what the right order management system can deliver – the ability to simplify fulfilment and provider better experiences for your customers. Specifically, it should help your business:

1. Boost fulfilment speed and accuracy

With a cloud-based order management system like Access Mintsoft, automatic updates are triggered with every order placed or dispatched. This removes the need to manually check your online shops for new orders and gives you real-time visibility of your end-to-end fulfilment process. Your customers can also easily stay up to date with where their order is, as well as view their order history.

“Mintsoft has allowed us to bring on more clients and scale our business at the rate we needed.”

“Ultimately, other systems out there can help to process orders, but how you go about doing it, and the speed you could do it at is what we were focused finding a solution for, and Access Mintsoft has helped us out massively.”

“Implementing Access Mintsoft has not only allowed us to take on more clients and create enough demand to move into our second warehouse, but continues to support us as we grow as a business.”

– ecommerce fulfilment business Haul and Store

2. Consolidate sales channels into a single solution

The importance of an order management system offering built-in integrations with marketplaces, shopping carts and couriers cannot be understated. API functionality is equally important to ensure you can connect the system to other core business platforms like warehouse management and accounting solutions.

Such integration capabilities allow you to consolidate all your key fulfilment solutions into a single system, so you can avoid or automate many manual processes, like data transfer, as well as the need to constantly log into different platforms.

All this results in you and your team saving hours each week, consolidated data across multiple business functions so you can gain more insights, and faster, more accurate order fulfilment for your customers.

3. Save time with smarter inventory management

A key advantage of an order management system like Access Mintsoft is its ability to enhance visibility and control of inventory. For instance, you can book inbound deliveries with a few clicks via your mobile device and set rules for how orders are packaged based on attributes like value, weight and shipping method. This helps improve packing accuracy and automate manual warehouse tasks.

Automated insights provided by cloud-based software are also a powerful tool to boost inventory management efficiency. For instance, based on product information, your solution can tell you the optimal location to store inventory and how it should be handled (if it is fragile, for example).

4. Improve visibility with tailored reports

With Access Mintsoft, all the data-driven insights you need to enhance productivity are at your fingertips. You can create customised reports and dashboards to easily track all your key business and fulfilment KPIs, from order volumes and stock availability, to picking accuracy, dispatch times and your most popular product lines.

Such visibility helps you identify trends like delivery spikes, for instance, so you can proactively manage resourcing. You can leverage in-built reports or customise them for specific metrics. Reports can be viewed within Access Mintsoft, exported via a CSV file or even scheduled to be sent to specific team members or external parties.

5. Enhance warehouse efficiency

Access Mintsoft not only provides comprehensive functionality for order management, but also warehouse management. It provides complete visibility of inventory levels, warehouse processes and courier services, with powerful automation to eliminate many time-consuming tasks.

The solution optimises warehouse space via automated location management and even provides a warehouse capacity map for full visibility. It can also automatically batch orders based on predefined rules and templates, helping increase picking efficiency and reduce manual errors. What’s more, your warehouse staff can pick and sort items quickly and easily with a barcode scanner.

Access Mintsoft can also automatically sync your stock levels and reorder inventory when stock falls below a specific level. Plus, it streamlines the process of creating shipping labels and order documentation.

6. Digitise processes

If your fulfilment processes require filling out, sorting, printing and finding paperwork, cloud-based software can save you and your team significant time and hassle. Digitising your processes will mean that all your documents are stored securely and efficiently in the cloud, where they can be easily located.

You won’t have to deal with lost paperwork again and can minimise the time and money spent on printing and posting documents. All it takes is a few seconds to search for any document in your order management system, then send them via email. Think about how much time and effort this will save your team if they need to send a series of documents to a list of customers, for instance.

7. Handle complex orders with ease

One way you can really streamline your day-to-day with order management system is by setting rules on how it will process certain actions when specific conditions are met. This means you can automate many manual tasks that are required with complex orders. For instance, with Access Mintsoft you can create rules to:

• Transfer an order to another warehouse closer to the delivery address
• Select the most cost-efficient and quickest courier service
• Generate a personalised gift note to be printed with the order
• Create a dangerous goods label and or select a specialist courier
• Automatically hold an order until payment is received

8. Ensure your stock levels are just right

Making sure you do not order too much or too little stock gets complicated when you are selling through multiple ecommerce channels. An order management system like Access Mintsoft can automatically monitor stock levels and sales data across all your channels, which are all integrated in a single platform. It regularly updates stock levels across all channels to ensure they are synchronised, ensuring you are not at risk of overselling products.

9. Streamline 3PL management

Cloud-based software can save 3PLs significant time and hassle when it comes to billing clients for multiple costs like shipping, storage or picking and packing costs. It eliminates manual processes by clearly breaking each cost down in the invoice, making life easier for your fulfilment partner.

With Access Mintsoft, you can make the billing process even easier by integrating your accounting platform. This means you can quickly import and export invoices between the two systems, which eliminates any error-prone manual data entry.

The solution also simplifies shipping costs for 3PLs by allowing you to set up pricing based on attributes like country, post code or package size and weight.

Grow your business with Access Mintsoft

Cloud-based order management software that is accessible from anywhere at any time, consolidates your data and automates tasks can deliver countless time and cost savings for your business.

Access Mintsoft provides all these advantages and much more, including complete visibility of your fulfilment processes and KPIs, making it simple to forecast demand so you can optimise your inventory levels.

The solution boasts over 175 pre-built integrations with leading couriers, multi-carriers and marketplaces, as well as API functionality to connect platforms like your accounting or ERP solution. Plus, you can ensure a smooth and timely implementation with our FlightPaths service, along with ongoing technical support.

CASE STUDY | How Black Bear Fulfillment benefited from Mintsoft OMS

Black Bear Fulfillment have a simple mission: To provide the high levels of fulfillment service to Australian customers, which they experienced as a former eCommerce seller in the US and UK. An eCommerce 3PL specialising in smaller consumer items, such as clothing and cosmetics, Black Bear Fulfillment are 100% Australian owned and operated. They are based in Melbourne and employ more than 40 people after launching just three years ago.

Unlike most 3PL’s they aren’t just focused on the logistics and warehousing side of the business, but also, importantly, the customer. Fulfillment is about people as much as it is logistics, and they needed a software solution to help bring this customer-centric vision to life.