The Ultimate Guide to Salesforce Order Management System

The Salesforce Order Management System is the heart of Commerce Cloud, handling everything from processing orders, accepting payments online, communicating with suppliers, tracking orders, coordinating shipment schedules, and processing returns. When integrated with customer service, it can help retailers assist customers when they need it, preventing delays in the ordering process and enabling ull order transparency, quick shipping, and timely delivery.

In times of digitization, customers want the entire buying process to work seamlessly from the moment of checking out till the time retailers receive the order. There is a stark change in customer expectations with an increasing demand for fast and easy shipping, hassle-free returns, and order tracking to know exactly where orders are and when it will be delivered. Apart from order processing, OMS also integrates customer-facing systems to positively impact the post-purchase experience, including ERP, CRM, sales, service, and commerce.

Salesforce Order Management System is central to the overall customer experience. It can make or break a brand’s relationship with the customer. 

Why Salesforce Order Management System?

If you are in the digital retail business, OMS is really important. Below are few of the challenges that OMS can easily counter:

• Automating manual order processing that can be tedious, time consuming, and expensive
• Coordinate orders and inventory across multiple channels
• Manage shipping schedules & complex orders
• Streamlining order fulfillment process 
• Provide reports and analytics for better decision-making

How to decide on an OMS?

Every business is different and has different processes and needs. It is very critical to decide which OMS suits your organization. Here are some of the pointers which may help to decide:

• Identify the pain points of the current Order Management System. Is it disparate? Are your systems not connected together, hampering gaining a holistic view of data? Are there any shipping delays, order cancellations issues or return process glitches due to which customer experience is getting hit and brand image is getting spoiled?
• Define the objectives of what you want to achieve from the new OMS implementation which should be scalable and flexible.
• OMS shall be capable and accept orders from multiple channels, route orders from fulfillment centers based on proximity, update on inventory levels, track orders online for the customers, provide a self-service option to customers for cancellations/return. Basically provide a unified experience for you and your customers.

Journey of an order

Typical order flow or journey looks like below and the questions that can be asked to understand order processing from the time it is placed for a better for an effective solution.

Order Capture

• What are the most popular channels through which orders are placed by your customers?
• Is an order placed from a storefront or any third-party channels as well?

Order Fulfillment

• Do you have any warehouse management system/inventory system in place?
• Does it  integrate with other systems for order fulfillment?
• How do you check the availability of products in the warehouse or the store or the nearest store to fulfill the order?

Order Deliver

• For the product shipping, are there any systems in place for the integration? Or is it done via ERP?

Return/Cancellation

• What is the return/cancellation process and policy?

Payment

• What are the most-desired payment options by your customers?
• How do you process product refunds or partial payment for half of the cancelled order?

Salesforce Order Management System (SOM)

Salesforce Order Management System (SOM) possesses all the typical OMS features and more. It acts as standalone OMS and can be easily deployed alongside any number of complementary cloud products from Salesforce. SOM is pre-connected to Commerce Cloud and natively supports Sales and Service Clouds as well because they are the offerings of the same platform, Salesforce. 

Order vs Order Summary

Order represents the customer intent, order creation, and order changes and is immutable upon activation. Order Summary is what we deal with the most, it presents the current state of order, including fulfillment orders, change orders and returns. Order summary gets updated upon any change while order remains the same. 

Order Lifecycle

How a typical order workflow will look like:

• The storefront receives the order and sends it the Order Management System
• The integration transforms the order data and inserts into Salesforce
• B2C Commerce customer profile is matched with customer account in Salesforce
• OMS creates summary records for order and its related records
• For fraud check, a custom integration with a 3rd party provider is available
• A custom flow based on different business needs to create fulfillment orders and then assigns to fulfillment locations based on order delivery group, inventory and other criteria
• The system updates the quantities and exports the fulfillment order to a fulfillment provider
• External provider returns an ASN( Advance Shipping Notice) to OMS
• Based on the data received, OMS creates shipment records and fulfillment order status to fulfilled or cancelled 
• Trigger to create invoices and interface with payment provider to ensure funds
• OMS updates quantities and statuses on associated summary records & exports invoices to an ERP

Where to learn and configure Salesforce Order Management System (SOM)

Partner Learning Camp( PLC) is the best place to learn and configure SOM.

Here are the some of the learning resources/sections for those who do not have access to the PLC:

Setting up the Environment

• This section talks about setting up and configuring the OMS org
• Activate order management  system features, Configure Field level security, Configure Reason codes, and Configure Delivery Methods
• Applying the sample flows available in the environment
• Deploy Named Credentials, Create Payment Gateway Provider, Create Payment Gateway

Placing Test Orders

• Create orders using Workbench with JSON example file and changing the identifiers in the org per your org- SalesChannelId, Pricebook2Id, OrderDeliveryMethodId, Product2Id, PricebookEntryId (these ids can be obtained via SOQL queries)

Troubleshooting Tips: SKU & Order Reference Number needs to be changed every time you run the JSON file and place the order.

Data Model and APIs

• Schema builder is the best way to understand the data model, objects and their relationships
• Creating Order Summary via Composite API 
• Query Order Summary by ID ( via SOQL query or via Composite API)
• Query Order Summary by ID Enhanced
• Cancel Item Preview

What does the Salesforce Order Management System comprises?

Here is the snapshot of objects involved in SOM.

Managing Process with Flows

This is one of the most important sections as every business and customer needs are different and configuring and customizing the flows can automate the processes and fulfill these needs. Below are the standard and installed flows given in the Salesforce Order Management System org which will be updated in each release:

Create Order Summary Flow

Creates the Order Summary and Order Payment Summary records once the order status is approved

Cancel Item Flow

• Users can cancel the item from order pre-fulfillment
• Reasons can be configured and order totals including promotions, tax and shipping costs can be recalculated
• Creates a Change Order and updates Order Summary to reflect new order totals and reduced quantity

Return Item Flow

• Users can return the item order post-fulfillment
• Reasons can be configured and recalculates order totals including promotions, tax and shipping costs
• Creates a Change Order and updates Order Summary to reflect new order totals and reduced quantity
• Generates payment refund and credit memo

Below are the sample flows which have been given by the Salesforce order management system team so that implementation partners don’t need to start from scratch. 

Create Fulfillment Orders for One Location

• Retrieve a Location and the Order Delivery Group Summaries for the specified Order Summary
• Retrieve all of the Order Product Summaries and create a Fulfillment Order for all Product Summaries
• Update the status of the Order Summary to ‘Waiting to Fulfill’

Create Fulfillment Orders for Multiple Locations

• Retrieve a default Location and the Order Delivery Group Summaries for the specified Order Summary
• Retrieve all of its Order Product Summaries
• Allocate each Order Product Summary to a Fulfillment Location
• If fulfillment location does not exist it selects the default location
• If fulfillment location exists it adds the Order Product Summary to it
• If fulfillment location doesn’t exist, it creates one and add the Order Product Summary
• Check for delivery charges and add it
• Update the status of the Order Summary

Create Invoice and Ensure Funds flow

• Calls the Create an Invoice from Fulfillment Order Flow then passes the created invoice to the Ensure Funds Async Flow core action.
• Payment integration options (Mock payment gateway)

Configure Process Exceptions

• Can create process exceptions for your business to raise a flag using flows

Modifying the User Experience

This section gives OMS the power of the Salesforce platform 

• Custom Lightning components can be built and deployed, mobile pages can be made, leveraging native Salesforce mobile apps, customizing the page experiences, creating order summary statuses for a path view
• Approving the Order Summary, Allocating the order summary, Generating Invoice and Settle
• Return and Cancel Order flow using “Actions and Recommendations” from the UI itself 
• Reports and Dashboards (the most powerful feature of Salesforce) for powerful analytics and data driven decisions

Salesforce provides a Sample Package Fulfillment in which there are sample processes, flows, and Apex Classes that can be implemented for an Order fulfillment workflow with SOM.

• Single fulfillment Location, Low Order Volume
• Single fulfillment Location, High Order Volume
• Multiple fulfillment Location, Low Order Volume

Moving ahead with Salesforce Order Management System

OMS implementation guide provides more details on the overall OMS implementation steps, best practices, and a guide which well covers the PLC courses in detail and provides more insights as per B2C commerce.

The Salesforce Order Management System is a relatively new product (though not so new now) and possesses immense potential since the strength of the Salesforce platform so we can expect trust, scalability, flexibility, reports, and dashboards (all benefits of the Salesforce platform). This saves your integration cost and maintenance if you are using other clouds of Salesforce. Connector is also available with B2C Commerce which is easily enabled by the Salesforce team for a seamless integration.

Another power pack feature is FLOWS since it can be tailored per the specific needs of the businesses and already samples have been given by Salesforce so the implementation partners need not to start from the scratch and have a base ready for the top up configurations/customizations.