“Order starts at home”- what wisdom is contained in this popular phrase!

The retail industry faces multiple challenges from various spheres, even before the pandemic brought its own difficulties. There are external challenges such as the emergence of a new and more informed, demanding consumer, as well as the brutal search for strategies to be at the top of the market.

The retail industry also faces internal challenges inherent to its operation and management, such as the adoption of new technologies and omnichannel strategies, as well as the need to change the classic approach of ‘discount equals higher sales’.

Today the commercial, technological, and logistical challenge is complex to tackle. The goal and mentality must focus first, not falling into despair that cause hasty and wrong decisions. To avoid failure, keep the business at the forefront, and comply with the ‘new rules of retail’, it is key to have an effective and intuitive inventory logistics and, more specifically, an adequate Distributed Order Management (DOM).

The Dynamics 365 for Retail Solution provides multiple tools and solutions that will facilitate the inventory order that a quality retailer requires today. DOM manages these solutions by integrating its ERP with the CRM, as well as a complete battery of productivity modules.

Some keys to maintain the agility of your orders and inventories

Let’s break it down… What precisely is Distributed Order Management?

The DOM is a Dynamics 365 for Retail Module that enables you to view inventory levels in real time, across all channels, and optimize order fulfillment, allocation, and distribution to better meet the needs of your customers.

To better optimize the operation, we’ll explain some of the main tasks of DOM dynamics:

Minimum inventory

• The DOM allows a specific quantity of a product to be “fenced off” for purposes other than order fulfillment. This makes it possible to reserve some inventory for walk-in clients. When using this type of rule, you can define the minimum inventory that must be maintained for a product category.

Location priority

• The DOM ranks locations by priority. The valid range of priorities is 1 to 10, where 1 is the highest priority and 10 is the lowest priority. Higher priority locations are considered before lower priority locations.

Partial orders

• The DOM defines whether an order, or order lines, can be partially fulfilled.
  It also allows retailers to fill orders from a single location. DOM ensures that all lines in an order are completed from a single location.

Maximum rejections

• DOM will define a rejection threshold. When this maximum is reached, the DOM will mark an order, or order line, as an exception and exclude it from further processing.

Maximum orders

• DOM allows organizations to define the maximum number of orders that a location or group of locations can process in one day.

Don’t neglect the optimization delivered by the ERP / CRM merger

Each software, by itself, plays a particular and fundamental role for each retailer.

ERP provides data on administrative tasks, purchase histories, accounting information, financial data, supply chain, and other management activities. The CRM provides information on the front-end functions, highlighting the monitoring of sales, interactions with customers, marketing campaigns, and more.

However, the rapid change and restructuring of the industry demands instantaneous responses to data analysis in real time. That requires accessing the data in one place through an ERP / CRM integration, in which integration for better decision-making is essential.

For this reason, Dynamics 365 for Retail unifies all the tasks of the retail trade- such as in-store, online, and back-office operations- for a better response capacity that is reflected in higher sales and productivity results.

ERP / CRM integration provides many possibilities, including:

• Launching marketing campaigns based on customer-centric data;
• Increasing customer loyalty with targeted offers and customer-centric rewards;
• Providing employees with intuitive technological tools so they can operate under this modality. Training is important;
• Greater growth of the entire operation by having data from all levels of the supply chain in real time, from anywhere.

Do You Want to Know More about DOM? Register for our Webinar!

You can attend our free webinar ‘Retail Success Cases: Increase Revenue and Improve Operational Efficiencies with Microsoft Dynamics 365’ that will take place on October 7th, 2021 at 11 am (EST).

Register here for free!