Use Order Summaries to Manage Orders

How often do you struggle to find the information you need to update an order or respond to a question from a customer? Do you frequently find yourself clicking from one system to another to retrieve order data, or searching for the one person on another team who might be able to help you? You’ve most likely dealt with one or more of these issues and then struggled to find a workable solution to fix the problem.

Wouldn’t it be great to see all the information you need at once—without having to access multiple systems or click through multiple records. Well, you’ve come to the right place. Salesforce Order Management puts an end to information anarchy by collecting all order processing and activity data from across all channels into a single record—the order summary.

Now, let’s not confuse this “order summary” with the snapshot of order details—products, prices, taxes, and fees—that typically accompanies an order receipt or invoice. That other type of order summary is only the tip of the information iceberg.

The order summary in Salesforce Order Management is much more than a simple rehash of order information. It’s a data object that consolidates all order information—from order capture through fulfillment, payment collection, shipping, delivery, and service—and displays it in a single view.

To fully understand the power of the order summary, you need to know a bit more about Salesforce objects. Let's take a moment to review a few key concepts.

Object: An object is a table in the Salesforce database that stores data for a specific record type. For example, an Order object is a table that stores data for order records.

Order Management uses objects to represent the elements of an order as the order progresses through the order lifecycle. Some of these objects are standard Salesforce objects, and some are only available with a Salesforce Order Management license.

Summary Object:  A summary object is a special type of object. Summary objects are populated with data from underlying data objects. For example, an Order Summary object pulls data from an underlying Order object that represents the original transaction order.

Order Management uses summary objects to provide a dynamic view of order data. Typically, users interact with the summary objects rather than the underlying data objects. For example, a service agent looking up information for a customer searches for the order summary, not the original order.

To see descriptions for all the order objects included with Salesforce Order Management, see the Order Management Objects link in the Resources section at the end of this unit.

Now that you’re familiar with the Salesforce terminology around objects, let's take a closer look at the Order and Order Summary objects. For simplicity, we’ll refer to them from now on as orders and order summaries.

When a customer submits an order from your ecommerce store, the details of the order transaction are transmitted to Salesforce Order Management. The order capture triggers the creation of an order and an order summary. The order, which represents the original order transaction, becomes the foundation of the order summary.

At this point, all the information in the order summary matches the information in the order.

The original order is now locked.

To track all subsequent order activity, Salesforce Order Management creates additional objects. These objects represent specific order elements, such as products, payments, and shipping. As an order moves through each stage in the order lifecycle, data from these objects dynamically updates the information displayed on the order summary. You can access the records represented by these objects from links provided on the Order Summary page in the Order Management console.

Now that we’ve explored the difference between an order and an order summary, let’s take a look at change orders.

Because the order summary is updated each time a change order is created, the values in the order summary are always equal to the sum of the corresponding values in the original order and all subsequent change orders.

By using change orders, instead of modifying the original order, Salesforce Order Management provides an easy way to track changes to an order, while maintaining a static record of the original order.

While the order summary makes it easy for you to see data for an individual order, sometimes you need to take a step back from day-to-day order processing and look at the big picture. You want to collect and see data for all your orders to help you analyze your processes, track shopping trends, and identify opportunities for improvement.

To retrieve and analyze order data, use the Report Builder tool to build a report for yourself or a report to share with your team. To build a report, you first define custom report types that determine the types of records for which users can create reports. A report type defines the set of records and fields available to a report, based on the relationships between a primary object and its related objects. Your reports show the records that meet the criteria defined in the custom report type.

After you define the custom report types, you can build reports to capture data from these object records and the data from all related object records.

In this unit, you learned all about orders, order summaries, and change orders. Now, let’s dig a little deeper and see how Salesforce Order Management helps you automate and manage order fulfillment and payment processing.