We’re a B2B company running Sales Cloud and Commerce Cloud only, no CPQ, Finance, or other ecosystem products.
We design and manufacture goods plus work with vendors, and I’m trying to leverage Order Management objects directly in the sales process for our direct sales team.
Here’s the workflow we’re building:
- Opportunity closes,
- Order gets created and validated with any additional line items like shipping or packaging.
- Then we create Order Delivery Groups and assign products to them based on where they’re shipping from and to.
- Once that’s locked in, we activate the Order, which triggers the Order Summary creation.
- From there, we create either Fulfillment Orders or -Work Orders to handle picking or manufacturing.
- When those complete, the Order Summary is complete and ready to ship, then we create Shipment record and shipment items.
My main questions: Is this a normal approach or am I going outside the intended use case? Will using Order Management this way conflict with our web store checkout process? Does this workflow actually make sense, or am I missing something fundamental?
Everything’s working so far, but I want to validate this before we build too much on it. Cheers for any insights
@* Sales Cloud - Best Practices * @* Sales Cloud - Getting Started * @* B2C Commerce *
Your workflow is logically sound and people do run OMS this way, but you're using it slightly against the grain of how it was originally designed. A few things worth pressure-testing before you build further:
OMS's data model assumes Order Summaries originate from a Commerce storefront. Direct-sales Orders work, but Order Summary reprocessing (cancellations, partial returns, post-activation line edits) gets awkward because the flows assume a B2C return path. Map out your change-management scenarios early.
Work Orders aren't natively integrated with the Fulfillment Order lifecycle the way picking/packing is. You can bridge it with flows, but the handoff between "manufacturing complete" and "fulfillment ready to ship" is custom territory — make sure someone owns that state machine.
On the Commerce conflict question: yes, this is a real risk if both your direct orders and storefront orders feed the same fulfillment configuration. Order routing rules, inventory reservation, and shipment grouping can collide. The cleanest pattern I've seen is separate Order Delivery Group routing logic per channel, with a shared inventory layer underneath.
Net: not outside the intended use case, but you're at the edge of it. Worth doing a proper architecture review before the customizations compound.
