Meet Industries Order Management
Learning Objectives
After completing this unit, you’ll be able to:
- Describe the challenges of order management and fulfillment processes.
- Identify key components of Industries Order Management (OM).
Before You Start
Before you start this module, make sure you complete the following required content. The work you do here builds on the concepts and work you do in the content.
Also, consider completing the following recommended content.
Order Management Challenges
Meet Greg Cappelli. He’s a fulfillment designer at Infiwave, a communications service provider (CSP) that sells communications equipment and services to businesses and consumers. Fulfillment designers play a key role in everything that happens after the customer places an order.
As a fulfillment designer, Greg builds various products, services, and resources in the digital Shared Catalog, and he helps with administration and run-time tasks. His work ensures that Infiwave activates and delivers orders quickly, effectively, and timely to its customers.
Infiwave has been busy digitally transforming its business by implementing Industries Configure, Price, Quote (CPQ); the Industries Shared Catalog; and the Enterprise Product Catalog (EPC). Industries Order Management (OM) is the final piece to the puzzle in Infiwave’s digital transformation journey. Industries OM is a Salesforce solution that exchanges data between the front-office customer request and the back-office fulfillment systems to deliver accurate services to the customer, thereby ensuring the process runs smoothly. You learn more about OM shortly.
Greg is excited because he knows that Industries OM integrates better with Industries CPQ and the Industries Shared Catalog. No more worrying about whether different systems can talk to one another. Industries OM integrates with Industries CPQ, OmniStudio, and many other Salesforce solutions and technologies. So what challenges is Greg looking forward to overcoming?
High Legacy-System Costs
For an order to go from a click of the customer’s mouse to an item in their hand, several different systems have to communicate. But with most order management solutions, those systems are all disconnected. Getting them to work together is a costly and time-consuming task. Greg struggled through extended delays getting products to market while developers for each system worked hard to integrate them.
Innovation Blockers
Customers expect flexibility in the digital world. For example, they’d like to change their orders mid-flight, that is, after the orders have been placed. But for Infiwave, how will the order management solution know about that change? Can the solution handle it automatically, or is that a few more months of rushed development?
Multiple Catalogs
Most order management systems divide their catalogs into commercial products and technical products. Commercial products are products that customers see, and technical products are the ones that back-end systems use. When order management systems design offers, they duplicate their design so that the two catalogs are in sync. But they don’t often stay in sync for long, as one team makes changes that the other doesn’t keep up with. Out-of-sync catalogs lead to invalid orders, which lead to orders that can’t be fulfilled and fall out of normal processing. This is called order fallout.
Luckily, Greg has Industries OM to help him solve these challenges.
Industries OM Solutions
A customer just ordered Infiwave’s broadband internet service. This seems like a simple order, but there’s a lot that happens before those cute cat videos can stream to the customer’s screens. Enter Industries OM.
Industries OM delivers orders with a catalog-driven approach that provides real-time visibility into the fulfillment process. It receives orders created by Industries CPQ and translates them into products and services that back-end systems can fulfill. It then orchestrates many important tasks, all the while sending information back to Industries CPQ so that nothing goes missing. This means faster, cleaner fulfillment, which leads to getting fluffy kitten videos on the screen sooner. Meow!
There are two components of Industries OM that take the order from submission to fulfillment. Here’s a short snippet on these components. We discuss them in detail in upcoming units.
- Decomposition breaks down an order into technical products and services.
- Orchestration takes decomposed products and services, and manages them across different systems.
Here’s how Industries OM meets all of Greg’s requirements by providing best-of-class tools in a single ecosystem that works together from day one.
Reduced IT Costs
Greg’s excited that Industries OM not only leads to huge efficiency gains, but also reduces Infiwave’s growing IT costs. Maintaining legacy systems isn’t cheap. As Industries OM and other Salesforce tools already speak the same language, there’s no need to waste time and resources getting them on the same page. That leaves more budget on the table for the annual company party.
Reduced Order Fallout and Increased Customer Satisfaction
Last year, Greg did some analysis and realized that the company’s fallout rates were as high as 50%. Behind every order that falls out, there’s a customer who is disappointed with Infiwave. But with Industries OM, products and services are validated at design time, so Greg doesn’t have to worry that orders are going to be rejected later. As a result, Infiwave sees a huge reduction in fallout and a huge increase in trust. If you can submit an order, then you can be sure it’s legit.
Reduced Time-to-Market for New Offers
Greg’s not the only one excited about the switch to Industries OM. Meet Sophia Perez.
Sophia is a sales manager at Infiwave. The company’s revenue is decreasing, and she’s determined to turn things around. She sees new products in Infiwave’s development pipeline that will be a hit with her customers, but the product managers say they can’t be sold yet because sales operations and fulfillment systems aren’t ready. And it seems to be taking a long, long time. She’s relieved to implement Industries OM because it means getting to market quicker, because all of the systems already work together in the Salesforce ecosystem. Quicker time to market means happier customers and a happier Sophia.
Real-Time View into Order Fulfillment
Another advantage of Industries OM is that Infiwave’s customer service reps now have real-time insight into the order process during customer interactions. They can see process flows in real time and can spot issues that get in the way of the customer receiving their order on time.
What’s Next?
Now that you know the Industries OM basics, we take it to the next level. Keep reading to find out which Salesforce clouds use Industries OM and what the solution map looks like.