Order Management Solutions (OMS) form the backbone of any omnichannel fulfillment and retail fulfillment operation. With feature rich and highly scalable OMS, customers are able to reduce their shipping cost by up to 8%. OMS delivers the capability to track the full life cycle of any order, while enabling retailers to optimally source and allocate product inventory while at the same time perfectly balancing margins, utilizing store capacity and meeting delivery expectations. This solution also provides up-to-the-minute inventory tracking for other channels by consolidating the inventory from various sources and applying exclusions and projecting them as appropriate to deliver on customer expectations.

See it, sell it and manage it more profitably to deliver on business goals and ever-increasing customer expectations.

Inventory Visibility enables up-to-the-minute inventory tracking and accurate available-to-promise data, even in businesses with high volumes and many SKUs. The cloud-based solution is demand-sensing and scales automatically without IT assistance. It integrates easily with your existing order management or ERP system as well as new sales channels.

Excel at omnichannel fulfillment, optimize costs and leverage inventory insights to avoid markdowns and stock-outs. The Fulfillment Optimizer is an AI-based cognitive analytics engine, which identifies the optimal fulfillment location for any order and has the capabilities to enable:

• Real-time optimization across multiple parameters

• A ‘What If’ simulation capability to evaluate various fulfillment models

• A shipping cost optimization tool to run throughout the journey of the customer order

• Predictive abilities to provide fulfillment recommendations based on learnings from past data

Create an end-to-end solution that delivers better results from the initial sale through return to resale. The solution will enable you to:

• Use returns as an opportunity to dynamically restock your stores in order to satisfy high predicted demand locations

• Reroute returns to locations where the predicted demand for that product is high

• Increase customer satisfaction, by providing insights during customer order placement (e.g., recommend right size based on past purchases to help avoid future returns)

Store Engagement provides a real-time view of your inventory and customer and order data through an intuitive user interface that’s accessible from sales counters and mobile devices. Purpose-built tools provide cross-sell and up-sell recommendations, help standardize processes for inventory and task management and enable flexible fulfillment options (such as curbside pick-up, buy online, pick-up in store and ship from store). It will also manage returns across channels. IBM Sterling Store Engagement allows store employees to provide omnichannel services in the store for fulfillment, inventory management, task management and customer service.

Control tower solutions provide actionable insights for managers to take actions to mitigate potential challenges. These solutions use predictive capabilities (AI/ML) to provide insights to improve supply chain performance. With the supply chain stretched to its limits, there needs to be a paradigm shift in how Operations and IT view performance. While KPIs provide results based on the actual events that occurred, the teams need to be equipped with tools and information to quickly review the data, understand how it was resolved in the past and collaborate efficiently with the involved parties.

The control tower provides a 360-degree view of the supply chain as well as a granular view for the operations team to focus and act upon the targeted areas.

IBM’s Rapid Response Solutions enable you to digitally transform your company to manage the last-mile with ship-to-store enablement, curbside pick-up capabilities, direct-to-consumer fulfillment, and global inventory visibility.

With curbside pick-up increasing over 200% due to the pandemic, many retailers are turning to solutions that provide this functionality and provide appointment-based shopping experiences for their customers. Our Rapid Response Solutions do just that. These solutions quickly integrate with existing systems and offer slots for curbside pick-up and in-store shopping. The slots are not fixed but can be adjusted based on the order volume or basket size to offer either additional slots or dynamically reduce slots to offer a better customer experience.

With curbside pick-up increasing, there is an increased appetite for the last mile delivery as well. This rapid response solution integrates the slots with the last mile delivery provider and offers the customer slots dynamically based on availability and basket size.