Technical performance demands vary widely according to the type of retailer using it. When considering the level of technical performance you need, you will need to take into consideration aspects such as the frequency of purchase of any particular SKU (which could be many times per minute), and the tolerance of customers who believe that an item is in-stock and available but is then told it is out of stock, etc.
For example, an international grocery retailer with online and offline operations may see tens of thousands of transactions per minute, covering hundreds of thousands of SKUs. In contrast, an exclusive, luxury retail brand will – almost by definition – require a maximum throughput orders of magnitude less than this, covering far fewer SKUs. For retail brands, taking into account seasonal peaks is a must: the OMS must be able to sustain the highest volumes of transactions of the year, even if this level of performance is not needed throughout the whole year.
Depending on what kind of retailer you are, technical performance might be a big weight in your decision, or not at all.
Speed
When considering the level of speed performance you need, you will need to take into consideration the tolerance of your customers: how long, for example, will they want to wait for confirmation of a successful order?
Reliability
Consider, too, reliability. When determining the reliability requirements for your OMS, you are to some extent measuring your organisation’s risk appetite/aversion. Many retailers make up to 80% of their revenue in the final quarter of the year - the run-up to Christmas. Reliability issues during this period could majorly impact revenue, profitability, and even viability - as well as reputation and customer loyalty.
Integration performance
An OMS is the beating heart of your retail operations – but, of course, no OMS operates in isolation. In fact an OMS will have, in front of it, customer-facing services: e-commerce platforms, point-of-sales systems, and CRM solutions. Behind it, we will find ERP platforms, finance solutions, payment solutions, transportation management systems and warehouse management systems. In this very real sense, your OMS is critical middleware, between these front-end and back-end solutions.
As such, the ability of an OMS to integrate (and thus communicate/exchange data) seamlessly with all of these solutions is critical. But simply to be able to communicate seamlessly isn’t enough: it must be able to so at speeds that eliminate any possibility of the OMS becoming any kind of a pinch-point in the overall system. There are a variety of ways of ensuring this; Kbrw is a staunch advocate of composable commerce, the MACH approach to development, in which all communication with other systems is via standardised APIs.
The integration performance of an OMS is important because it will impact time-to-value of your OMS investment and because you do not want your OMS to become a bottleneck in your retail IT ecosystem.
Integration with other systems is also important (along with the speed of communications with those other systems) because an OMS always needs to present “real” real-time stock capacity. This ensures a retailer can avoid ‘selling’ products that have already been sold, but can also sell products that are, in fact, available (such as returns) even though they're not physically back in stock yet.
Business performance
We review the business performance of an OMS in three buckets. The first of these is the flexibility of the OMS to adapt to meet the ever-changing needs and circumstances of a customer’s business – for example, its ability to:
- react to new customer expectations, or to enable new customer behaviours;
- to enable new business processes and the creation of new workflows; and
- to meet the external challenge or responding to increased competition
The second element of the business performance of an OMS is its ability to deliver value quickly: is it rapid to deploy, and can it be configured to deliver new value more quickly than others? The "new value" in question depends on the business; for example, new value might be an improvement in the proportion of completed orders, or an increase in 24hrs delivery capabilities. It all depends on your priorities and strategies, regarding both supply chain and customer experience.
The third element is the extent to which the investment in an OMS is future-proofed: in years to come, will the OMS be extensible through the addition of new modules? Will the solution be able to adapt to new, perhaps even not-yet-dreamed-of processes, customer journeys or requirements?
In a nutshell: will it, rapidly and for the entirety of its implementation, enable and deliver ROI?
Summary
An OMS with performance issues – or, more precisely, an OMS the performance of which does not match the requirements of the organisation using it – will soon be found unable to meet the actual needs of the business, and/or will be unable to deliver value both quickly and reliably. The position that an OMS occupies in an ecosystem means that the OMS will rapidly become a bottleneck for that ecosystem.
Conversely, a high-performing OMS is able to meet both existing business needs and to adapt evolving or future requirements – for example by creating new workflows or integrating new purchase journeys on demand. And, by being able to do so quickly, it ensures a rapid time-to-value. Perhaps most significantly of all, a high-performing OMS will bring out the best of the entire, existing IT ecosystem.
So, yes, you need to care about the high performance of an OMS: the platform you ultimately choose will occupy a critical position in your business and be a significant influence on your success. But both the relative and absolute importances of each of the three dimensions of “high performance” will be different to just about every business – so you should also care just as much about understanding your own needs, and placing due emphasis where it’s most needed.
Find out about Kbrw's high-performance OMS here.