We gather orders from your e-commerce site, marketplaces, the B2B dealer portal, the showroom and the telephone into a single pool. Stock is promised from one source rather than divided up channel by channel; the allocated quantity comes off it, and cancellations and returns come back into it. The aim is not to sell the same item twice, and to see where an order stands from a single screen.
When a company sells through one channel, nobody speaks of order management as a separate job; the order comes in, stock is deducted, it is shipped. As soon as the number of channels grows, the picture changes fast. Your own site, several marketplaces, the B2B portal your dealers enter orders into, sales in the showroom and orders that still arrive by telephone or WhatsApp are all fed from the same warehouse; but each of them holds stock as a separate number on its own side. When you have thirty units of a product, thirty are written to the marketplace, thirty to the site and thirty to the dealer portal. While that split works, the problem stays invisible; when sales get busy, the same product is sold into more than one channel on the same day. Then come the cancellation, the customer complaint, the performance penalty on the marketplace side and an endless stream of telephone calls between the sales team and the warehouse.
Order management and orchestration, that is OMS (Order Management System), is the layer that ties this scatter to a single decision point. The essence of the job is not sharing stock out between channels but promising it from a single pool. Orders from every channel land in the same pool; the moment an order is taken, the relevant quantity is allocated to that order and the quantity showing as open to the other channels drops. This is called promisable stock, that is ATP (Available to Promise): not the physical stock you hold, but the quantity you can genuinely sell today. Pending supply orders, reserved quantities, blocked stock on the dealer side and products expected back as returns all enter this calculation. Orchestration, in turn, is managing which steps an order passes through, and under which rule, from acceptance to delivery.
There are three things OMS is most often confused with, and the boundary has to be drawn from the outset. An e-commerce platform is the shop window; it shows the product and runs the basket and the payment, but it knows nothing of the other channels. The ERP is the centre of accounting and financial record; it holds the invoice, the account and the official stock, but it was not designed to manage the operational life cycle of an order or the rules of a channel. Warehouse management, meanwhile, is concerned with which shelf the product sits on in the warehouse. OMS stands between these: it determines how much has been promised to which channel, which warehouse or branch an order will be fulfilled from, in which situation it will be put on hold, and when stock will count as sellable again once a return comes in. The layer we build does not replace these three, it fills the gap between them.
Building this honestly requires saying two things plainly. First, overselling is not eliminated entirely. Stock updates on the marketplace side are not instantaneous, there are API quotas and delays; two customers putting the last unit in the basket seconds apart is possible in any system. What we do is reduce that risk noticeably with channel-level buffer quantities, fast synchronisation and last-unit rules; we do not promise zero. Second, an OMS does not create stock accuracy. If the physical quantity in the warehouse does not match the record, the system will distribute the wrong number to every channel quickly and consistently. That is why, when a project starts, we discuss stock-count discipline and getting stock movements recorded before we discuss software.
Manufacturers and wholesalers whose own site, marketplaces and dealer portal are all fed from the same warehouse. In these companies the stock picture becomes unmanageable by hand as the number of channels grows, and decisions shift with how busy the day is. The gain starts with establishing the rule that stock is promised from a single pool instead of being divided between channels.
Businesses selling wholesale to dealers and retail to end consumers. The two sides differ in price, payment terms, credit limit and delivery priority. When they share the same stock and no rule defines which order is fulfilled first on a scarce product, the decision falls to an individual every time and produces constant tension between the dealer and the end consumer.
Firms that ship from more than one warehouse, branch or showroom. Which point an order is fulfilled from can be tied to rules covering distance, stock, delivery time and shipping cost. Otherwise goods are sent from far away while the nearest warehouse holds the product, stock piling up in one branch cannot be sold, and unnecessary transfer traffic builds up between two points.
Firms working in categories such as fashion, footwear and spare parts, where the return rate is structurally high. If it is unclear when a return counts as sellable stock again, surplus and shortfall are seen at the same time, channel reconciliation spreads over months and refunds to the customer are delayed. Once the rule is clear, these three problems ease together.
Orders from the e-commerce site, marketplaces, the B2B portal, the showroom and manual entry are converted into the same structure and gathered into one list. Which channel each order came from, on which price list and under which terms it was taken, stays in the record. The team no longer has to look at each channel's own panel separately; the channel panels do not close, but the daily work runs from a single screen.
The moment an order is taken, the relevant quantity is allocated to that order and comes off sellable stock. Pending supply orders, reserved quantities and blocked stock are taken into account to calculate the promisable quantity, that is ATP (Available to Promise). On orders whose allocation period expires or whose payment does not arrive, the allocated stock is released by rule and put back on sale.
The sellable quantity is sent to every channel at a set frequency. On fast-moving products a channel-level buffer quantity is defined and the last few units are treated more cautiously. This approach reduces the risk, it does not remove it altogether; when overselling does occur the system flags it as an exception, determines who will intervene, and what will be said to the customer has already been decided.
Which warehouse, branch or supplier an order is fulfilled from is determined by rules on stock, distance, delivery time and cost. Orders that cannot be completed from one point can go out as split shipments; how many parts they go in, and whether the extra shipping cost is accepted, are managed by rule. The rule is your decision, the system only applies it consistently; two employees do not reach different decisions in the same situation.
Approval, payment check, credit limit and payment-term checks, preparation, packing, handover to the courier and delivery statuses are tracked in one flow. On the B2B side, a dealer order that exceeds the limit goes for approval automatically. Every status change is logged together with the answers to who, when and for what reason; orders on hold are listed together with the reason they are waiting.
A return request is handled in the same flow regardless of the channel it comes from: reason code, product inspection, the sellable or scrap decision, refund or exchange. The product only returns to sellable stock after it has passed inspection, so goods you do not have are not put on sale. A report of return reasons by product and channel is seen regularly for the first time in most companies.
Marketplace and e-commerce APIs, courier companies, the ERP and the accounting system are connected; the invoice and e-archive flow is triggered from here. When an integration returns an error, the transaction does not disappear quietly: it is retried at set intervals, and if it cannot be resolved it lands on the exception list and the person responsible is notified. Every exception has an owner and a resolution time. An error nobody sees is the most expensive kind of error in order management.
We map how many orders come from which channel, how stock is shared out today and which products overselling happens on. Channel priorities, the returns policy and payment terms are put in writing. The output of this step is not software but an agreed set of rules; software written before the rules are settled gets rewritten before long.
The different codes the same product carries in each channel are tied to a single product identity; variants, bundles and set products are separated out. The physical stock in the warehouse is compared against the record and the reasons for the differences are examined. This step is the most underestimated part of the project and, depending on the number of products, generally takes between two and five weeks.
Stock allocation periods, channel buffer quantities, source warehouse selection, split shipments, approval thresholds and the returns flow are defined. Before the rules go live they are tested against historical order data; the result is compared with the decisions you made at the time and the differences are discussed one by one. A rule that is not accepted does not go live.
The connections are set up and the system is run first on a single channel or a single product group. The old method runs in parallel for a while; stock and order differences on the two sides are checked daily. In most projects the pilot is completed in four to eight weeks, and in that time it becomes clear how the rules behave under real traffic.
The remaining channels are added one by one, the exception list and the alerts go live, and the reports are opened up. Handover to your team takes place; who looks at which exception and how the rules are to be changed are left in writing. Afterwards monitoring continues under maintenance, and when you open a new channel it is added to the same structure rather than the system being rebuilt.
No, and we do not promise that. Stock updates on the marketplace side are not instantaneous; because of API quotas, queue delays and caching on the platform side, a gap measured in seconds always remains. What we do is shrink that risk measurably: fast synchronisation, channel-level buffer quantities, cautious handling of the last few units, and catching overselling as an exception when it happens so that it is clear who does what. We suggest you treat with caution any proposal that promises zero overselling.
It will not. This is one of the most important limits we have to state on this page. An OMS assumes the number you hold is correct and distributes it to the channels; if the record is wrong, it spreads the wrong number faster and further. That is why, when the project starts, we discuss stock-count discipline, getting warehouse in and out movements recorded, and how waste and samples will be deducted. If stock accuracy is not good enough, we suggest you fix that side first and bring the software in afterwards.
Not every company does. If you sell from a single warehouse, with a single price list and through a limited number of channels, the integrator solution you already have is most likely enough, and we say so plainly. The need for an OMS generally arises in these situations: B2B and B2C share the same stock; shipments go out from more than one warehouse or branch; different priority and allocation rules are needed per channel; or the volume of returns is distorting stock visibility. We work out together during discovery which of these you are in.
No. The ERP or accounting program you use stays where it is; the invoice, account and official stock records continue to be held there. The OMS is the operational layer working on top of it: it collects the orders, allocates stock, promises to the channels, manages the flow and writes the result back to the ERP. We build it this way both to avoid disturbing your accounting order and to make the transition gradual. The source code and the data are yours in every case.
Yes, but their rules are defined differently. On the dealer side the price list, credit limit, payment term, minimum order quantity and approval threshold come into play; on the end consumer side payment approval and the shipping process are at the front. The two share the same stock pool, and which of them takes priority on a scarce product is written as a rule. We do not make that commercial decision on your behalf; we discuss it openly during discovery, put it in writing and build the system accordingly.
A single order pool into which all the channels land; stock allocation and a promisable stock calculation; synchronised feeds to the channels and buffer rules; source selection that determines which warehouse an order is fulfilled from; status tracking and an audit record from approval to delivery; the returns, exchange and cancellation flow; an exception list where integration errors land; reports by channel, product and return reason. The source code, the documentation and the data belong to you.
In a 30-minute discovery call we listen to what you need and tell you honestly whether custom development or an off-the-shelf product is the better answer.
We gather all of a product's attributes, descriptions and translated texts in one centre, and produce the enriched version for each sales channel's own template from there. A field that is missing or breaks a rule is caught before the product goes out to the channel. Product data no longer lives in a file on somebody's desktop.
Details →We bring photographs, video, catalogues and design files together in a single archive, and record which product each file belongs to, which version is approved and where it may be used. The sizes and formats each channel asks for are derived automatically from the original, so nobody spends their time resizing files.
Details →We bring the store's till, stock, promotions and shift handover together in a single system. The POS here is not the virtual POS on your website; it is the real till on the counter. In multi-branch structures, prices and promotions are managed centrally and the day closes with the same discipline in every branch.
Details →We turn the production plan into a sequence at machine and line level: tooling and set-up times, bottleneck capacity, the date material will be ready and priority rules are calculated together. The result is a schedule that can genuinely be applied on the shop floor and a defensible due date that can be given to the customer.
Details →We bring production, quality, maintenance and inventory operations together in a shared data model. The same stoppage, the same lot and the same shift meet in one record instead of four separate places; shift handover is put in writing, and management looks at a single set of indicators.
Details →We keep machines, plant, vehicles and equipment on a single record from the moment they are bought to the moment they are disposed of. Warranty, criticality, spare parts, maintenance cost and depreciation accumulate on the same asset card; the decision to replace stops being a guess and starts resting on the record that has built up.
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