In today’s world, every retailer’s biggest challenge is to ensure the shopper’s loyalty, and retailers are constantly dealing with this. Retailers need an intelligent and efficient supply chain to deliver the product. Retailers who operate the order fulfillment without synced-up end-to-end order promising, risk losing shoppers, increased costs, and falling behind competitors who can meet customer demands more efficiently.
Order Promising ensures promises are kept, all the product in the cart, better customer experiences, and chaos is transformed into orderliness. IBM Sterling Intelligent Promising combines inventory and capacity visibility with sophisticated fulfillment decisioning to help the retailers to maximize inventory productivity, make reliable and accurate order promises, and optimize fulfillment decisions at scale.
There are plenty of benefits. They include:
- Improved Customer Satisfaction: Accurate delivery estimates and reliable order fulfilment enhance customer trust and satisfaction. This leads to higher conversion rates and fewer cancellations.
- Efficient Resource Utilization: Optimized inventory, production, and logistics such as consolidated shipping reduces wastage and operational costs.
- Reduced Delays: Coordination between order promising and order management minimizes delays and ensures timely deliveries.
- Enhanced Brand Reputation: Consistently meeting delivery commitments strengthens the brand’s reputation for reliability.
- Lower Operating Costs: Better inventory control and resource allocation lead to cost savings.
- Streamlined Supply Chain: A well-coordinated system ensures smoother and more efficient supply chain operation.
How This “Promise” can be Achieved
Adoption of cutting-edge technology enables retailers to ensure the most accurate ‘Promise’ to their Shoppers! IBM’s Sterling Intelligent Promising (SIP) solution offers greater certainty, choice and transparency across shoppers’ buying journey. It is designed to revolutionize order promising and fulfilment in the ever-evolving world of commerce.
It’s a SaaS platform that has the following three services.
- Inventory Visibility
- Promising
- Fulfillment Optimizer
All the three services modules are independent, but they share a common single platform SIP.
- Maximize inventory productivity: Use real-time inventory visibility to confidently expose inventory and maximize conversions, gaining granular control over inventory actions, such as safety stock setting based on configurable business rules. Improve inventory turns by applying additional context like channel, fulfillment type and labor availability when making available-to promise decisions.
- Make and manage order promises: Improve conversion rates by confidently delivering order and delivery promises across every step of the shopping journey, including the product list page, product detail page, cart, and checkout. Automate the review of inventory, capacity, and costs to make informed promises, and harness powerful AI during fulfillment to simplify complex scenarios like orders with third-party services and support a wide range of fulfillment options.
- Optimize omnichannel profitability: Set operating performance objectives and KPIs using real cost drivers (like distance, labor, capacity, and carrier costs) and profit drivers (markdown, stockout), so you can confidently make the best fulfillment decisions for your business objectives. By optimizing across thousands of fulfillment permutations in milliseconds, retailers can ensure balance between profitability and the best customer experience.
SIP is the future of OMS, it ensures that the customers receive their orders on time, with trust and loyalty. SIP can employ AI and predictive analytics to anticipate demand, optimize inventory, and offer customer-centric promises. In an increasingly complex supply chain environment, it collaborates with suppliers for synchronized commitments, helping businesses stay agile and responsive to market shifts. IBM Sterling Intelligent Promising is not just a solution for today but a strategic asset for the future.
