In these modern days, online retailers are dealing with challenges in terms of increasing marketplace channels, faster delivery expectations. Therefore, in order to keep the standards high, restaurant owners need to provide quick delivery and that is too tough without any technology. This is possible only with the help of a systematic Order Management System for restaurant businesses.
Order management touches virtually every system and process in the supply chain. Most companies no longer contain order management within their organization. They involve multiple partners, such as parts and components suppliers, assembly and packaging services, or distribution centers — making it easy to lose visibility and control of the order. This results in costly manual processes to complete and deliver the order without errors. An OMS can help control costs and generate revenue by automating manual processes and reducing errors. Many companies are now using the order management system to make their business more successful.
Traditionally, the order management experience involved error-prone, manual tasks, especially in order entry and inventory management. Multiple hand-offs among departments increase overhead and the potential for error or fraud. Then there’s inefficiency. When each department uses a different software system, that makes it is difficult to get a clear view of the entire process. Disconnections between business groups result in redundancy, increased costs, and customer frustration—for example, a customer placing an e-commerce order that cannot be fulfilled in a timely manner.
Why Order Management for Restaurant Businesses Is Important?
As your sales increase, your manual order processing can begin to break down. You take too long to enter data, you’re prone to critical errors like shipping to the wrong address, and you can’t easily track orders for customers.
At this point, your online business is ready for an order management system (OMS), or software built to help you centralize your order processing across sales channels and fulfillment methods. It automates your workflows and helps you control your customer experience.
What Does an Order Management System Do?
An order management system helps improve your order to cash cycle (OTC), which is how your business receives, processes, manages and completes customer orders. This includes everything from collecting payment, shipping the items, creating invoices, and reporting.
The order to cash cycle is critical to the success of your online business. It impacts your bottom line and the customer experience.
This also means that order management systems provide a wide range of functionality that help manage the people, processes, and integrations involved with completing an order from any sales channel:
- Payment
- Customers
- Inventory, or stock levels
- Suppliers
- Returns and refunds
- Invoices
- Packaging and Delivery
Features of an OMS
Multi-channel Order Management
For effective selling, many e-commerce businesses establish several sales channels. They include a website, e-commerce store, market platforms, mobile apps, and others. Each channel can have its own way of order processing as well as different customers. A robust OMS integrates all these channels into one user interface, providing an overall view of items purchased, customer data, orders data, etc. This allows providing more personalized service to customers as well as better synchronizing order management processes.
Support of Order Volume Growth
With OMS businesses can significantly increase the number of orders they can process. Meanwhile, the system won’t require more staff for effective order management and fulfillment. This way, companies can expand their services without relying on the size of their order management teams.
Access to Cross-Border E-commerce
Many e-commerce businesses operate in the international markets. Thus, they need to consider that their OMS will be able to process cross-border orders, e.g. payment in diverse currencies, order management experience, delivery options, etc.
Integration with Other E-commerce Systems
This way, the order management process becomes more visible and accessible across departments, ensuring its seamless and error-free operation. Many companies are now improving their order management experience.
Final Thoughts
Choosing the right OMS for your business is an important decision. Assess your current business needs while also thinking carefully about your company’s future requirements, taking into account expectations of business growth, global expansion, increasing order volumes, and expanding sales channels. Therefore, companies are now using order management for restaurant businesses. Most OMSs have the ability to integrate with other back-office functions—particularly your finance software. The platform can pull information from your accounting software to merge inventory and sales data. OMS can easily make your business more successful.