[00:00:05.080] Good morning, everyone. It’s another end of the week. I’m welcoming my dear friend and Korber liaison, Matt Boland. Thank you for joining us, Matt.
[00:00:16.530] Thank you. I’m going to add the word liaison to my title. I like that.
[00:00:20.360] And it was a nice french touch, so. Yes, that’s why I use that word. We’re talking very often all together, and I know your specialty is in Oms. Do you want to introduce yourself a little bit before we kick that off on what is an Oms?
[00:00:36.740] Sure. So Matt Boland, work here at Korber supply chain solutions. Been here for moving into my second year. I have a passion for OMS, though. I represent the entire Korber portfolio of supply chain solutions, I work on the partner side and have been working with partners for probably the last seven years of my career. Originally, I was in direct sales and direct sales pretty much all my life of supply chain and e commerce solutions. So have a great passion for the space. I like seeing supply chain and e commerce being blended, and particularly, I have a passion for oms. So we’ll hit a little bit of that today. Angie, thanks for having me.
[00:01:18.310] Thank you. And that’s a new trending word. I’ve been doing WMS implementation for the last 15 years, and I would say that since three, four years, I’m hearing more and more oms, and I’m actually questioning myself, what is an OMS? What’s the purpose of an OMs?
[00:01:37.630] Sure. So it’s funny because OMS means a lot of different things to a lot of different people. So order management system, right. If you talk to companies, they feel based on their perception, they’re performing order management. But in today’s world of distributed networks and partner solutions and drop shipping and extended distribution, global distribution warehouses, you own and you don’t own vendor managed inventory. All these complexities that are part of today’s supply chain kind of made it a requirement that a solution beyond an e commerce platform, beyond an ERP system, came to be. Order management systems kind of got its start. Distributed order management systems. I like to use the word distributed instead of just order management because it speaks to the nature of a network. Right. A distributed network of supply chain for each. Companies really kind of got its start in retail because companies were trying to keep more foot traffic into the retail stores. And so they wanted to perform solutions like buy online, pickup in store, or drop ship from the manufacturer. Those types of strategies, but more and more, and our specialty at Kerber is talking about order management from the b two b perspective.
[00:02:59.650] So some companies will think, hey, we do our order management in our ERP system, or we do our order management through our e commerce platform. Really, they’re missing out. That’s really where the conversation should begin. But an OMS ultimately is and was designed probably in the early two thousands. One of the early adopters was like Best Buy corporation, those types of companies. But we’re seeing it more and more creep into b two b. But if I were to give you kind of the description of what an OMS is, what a distributed order management system is, it was essentially designed to manage and fulfill customer orders across multiple channels, locations and systems within a supply chain network. Some of the aspects that you might want to do outside of an ERP or outside of an e commerce application, and why order management is so critical to augment and complement these solutions is to do order orchestration, to have inventory visibility, to be able to fulfill route allocate inventories, fulfill those orders again, as I mentioned, and then distributed order management systems. Anytime you try to incorporate an order management system into your network of solutions, integration capabilities are the top of the hill.
[00:04:19.620] Every order management engagement, or let’s say project, will be an integration project. But it’s about bringing all those distributed things into a single version of the truth. One application that sees broadly across your entire network. That’s an order management system.
[00:04:39.380] What would you say the big difference between the order management system and the ERP? Because I assume that part of the feature set that you just mentioned was already in ERP. Where is the line of the Oms?
[00:04:57.100] Yeah, so it’s a great question. And I think that’s where a lot of companies struggle saying, well, I already do this. Right? I already do these things, but they do it in kind of a restricted manner. And I’m not saying ERP can’t do some of these things, but I think one of the critical elements of ERP is what will it take to do these things? Time and money. So an order management system offers the scalability, the performance, the flexibility to create an ecosystem of all of those distributed channels, the distributed partners that you leverage as part of your supply chain. So I kind of classify it, is the order management becomes the system of process, right. It manages end to end. What’s happening on those orders. And when you think about an ERP, an ERP is really good at what it’s described for, right? Where did the acronym come from? Enterprise resource planning. Right. So what’s happening within the enterprise? But so much of today’s world is distributed, right? So you know that’s where the critical elements come in. I kind of look at it in two ways. There’s a technical aspect of when to use an OMS versus an ERP.
[00:06:16.740] There’s a functional aspect, and then there are kind of business benefits for each. But the conversation is starting to happen and many of my b, two b clients are saying, geez, I don’t think I should be calculating my available to promise inventory in my ERP system. I think that’s better if I look at something or use something that can look outside within my distributed network. One of the key elements of this is that erps are hard to integrate and erps like to own what they’re planning. So in the case of, let me give you an example. In the case of inventory, a company, an ERP system doesn’t like to look for inventory that it doesn’t own as its system of record, right? That’s where an order management application provides exponential value by saying, I don’t have to fulfill this order just from the inventory I own. I can save dollars, many dollars, on every order by looking out into my distributed network, not only from the time I get the product to the client, but also the costs of shipping and also not depleting my existing inventory. That’s kind of a great analysis of what happens and in that orchestration engine is just so much what if, right are art of the possible when you use a distributed order management to solve some of the distributed order management system, to solve some of those problems?
[00:07:53.770] Hopefully that makes sense.
[00:07:55.160] Yes. Thank you. And that brings us my next question, where like, what is the most amazing feature that everyone is talking about or everyone is looking into to have in their omsheen?
[00:08:10.970] Geez, there’s a lot of stuff coming out. I think maybe a couple of things that, well, let me give you my top one. That is, I know that you. So let me give you an example also that’s kind of specific to what you do so well. You folks are very, very accomplished and have an extreme level of expertise in the food service industry, right? One of the things in food service that we’ve noticed and has been around for a while and also applies across other industries, but we see it a lot in foodservice is automating the fair share capabilities across the customers, right? So let’s just say in a scenario, this distributor of product has 100 units on hand of SKU XYZ, right? We have 100, but customers one through five, each order 40 units. So now your demand exceeds your on hand inventory. So what fair share allocation will do is it’ll kind of weight the percentages. It’ll prioritize against customers. And this can all be related as well to SLA’s that you have with your customers. So immediately, one customer might say, do not ship it to me unless you can ship it in full, right?
[00:09:41.810] So that immediately gets 40 other units back into the SKU count, because that customer won’t accept an incomplete shipment. Right. So all these things get weighted, and then what it says, or what happens is the. The automation of that fair share will be calculated, and it’ll say, okay, I can allocate 20 to each of these customers, right? Or. And that uses up, you know, one through five, one through four, that will. Or one through five, depending on how you do the math, that’ll allocate. In the case of using all five, they’ll all accept partial shipments. That’ll allocate 20 to each customer. Right. But you might also look into the SLA and customer, one might say, do not ship me anything less than 70% of my. So all these calculations are being done in the system based on SLA’s that the company has with its customers. Right. And, of course, in distributed order management system might actually say, at the end of the day, I can’t solve this, right?
[00:10:53.890] No, because that’s a nightmare for the warehouse. Mostly, the people who’s in charge of waiving in the warehouse, they need to look at all of the orders, look each line, and decide, oh, I’ll remove ten here, 20 here. And then they’re making a mistake. They’re going back in the order, making new updates. It could take an hour for a wave planner to align and distribute that share.
[00:11:16.260] Exactly. So it takes it out of the warehouse, having to make decisions. It can put it in the hands of the user. It doesn’t all have to be automated. Like I said, it could be, I can’t solve this. And it’ll kick it out to somebody to look at it. Then some manual things can happen where somebody might call the customer and get an exception. But if you ship these things out, and if the warehouse makes decisions and the warehouse isn’t looking at the slae, then the shipment could go out, you could get chargebacks, you could get refused shipments. Now your customer is angry. There are also all kinds of other elements that go into the available to promise and the sourcing and orchestration of orders. Let’s just say they won’t accept a partial shipment. One customer might not accept a partial shipment. But when you have a distributed order management system that does not mind looking at inventory it doesn’t own within the ERP. It might say, okay, take 20 from this customer and drop ship 20 from the other customer. And because they don’t want separate shipments, take that other 20, send it to my warehouse, I’ll consolidate it, I’ll ship it.
[00:12:28.940] These are the kind of things it gets really complex, right? But you can see where the system making these decisions in accordance with an SLA you have with the client, kind of makes it fail safe, right? Let’s not make mistakes on these orders and these kind of things. When you think about it, it drives a lot of the business benefit and the metrics that a company might be tracking for its supply chain. Like on time, in full orders, right. My available to promise it. Also because of the integration that is done. I’ve been to a lot of companies wherever, trying to find that inventory means logging into one warehouse, logging into a different system, logging into this. Well, with the distributed order management, you now have a single version of the truth. You’re in the UI, you’re looking at your current inventory, and you understand it not just by what the ERP system owns, but what’s in the entire network, right? You’re looking at it, you’re able to make decisions. And not only are you able to make decisions as an individual, the system’s able to make decisions because it has a complete picture of your inventory status and orchestrates orders and fulfills orders based on that complete picture.
[00:13:42.510] Nice. I’m hearing great things. Order orchestration, inventory visibility, dropship share now you said fair share distribution. It’s a lot of nice feature. Thank you very much for your time. That was all the question. I’m pretty sure that’s going to start, maybe other questions from our viewers usually does. So I don’t know where to point, but if you have any question, fill them in below our YouTube link and we will do a part two with your question and Matt and I will answer them.
[00:14:19.800] Yeah, be happy to. And geez, I was on a roll. We done already? Thanks so much, Angie, for the opportunity. It doesn’t cost anything for a customer to have a conversation with you. I’m not in sales, I’m a partner guy. So there’s no pressures there either. I look forward to having any conversations with any of the clients that you’d like to, or any clients that would like to have conversations about order management and in fact, the entire portfolio of services that we offer here at Kerber. And I’m just really happy to have such an outstanding partner like lid. Thanks so much for the time today.
[00:14:49.670] Thank you very much, Matt. Have a nice day.
[00:14:52.280] You too. We’ll talk to you later. Bye.
