How retailers compete on speed, at scale, with fabric OMS

We’re turning speed into a competitive advantage for large omnichannel retailers.

For retail businesses, the ability to operate fast and at scale is critical. Anything that limits or slows down the shopping experience could mean the difference between an engagement or a bounce, a conversion or abandonment, or a lifetime customer versus a lost customer.

Here at fabric, we’ve built our order management system (OMS) for scalability and to stand out as an enterprise solution that delivers on speed. Not only can it handle hundreds of orders per second for thousands of locations, it is also a fastest-in-class solution that boasts powerful features, including:

• Real-time inventory;
• Direct connections to source of truth systems;
• Ultra-fast storefront APIs; and
• Order orchestration and advanced order routing.

With fabric OMS, merchants and operators can enhance customer satisfaction, make data-driven decisions for more efficient and streamlined operations, and take sweeping control of inventory, orders, and fulfillment with its advanced capabilities.

Leverage the power of real-time inventory

Without accurate and fast inventory data, inventory forecasting and predicting becomes harder purely from unforced errors caused by a lack of data precision. Additionally, two major issues that often plague retailers are overselling and underselling. When overselling, retailers disappoint their customers when they promise more stock than they have available, and when underselling, retailers can’t meet customer demand and end up missing out on potential sales. These are concerns that can ripple across operations and impact the overall shopping experience.

The problem is that most merchants are stuck with slow and outdated solutions that have, at best, a batch update process. This means that inventory is only updated in batches anywhere from every 15 minutes to every few hours. Retailers are left with sometimes wildly outdated information, which leads to friction, frustration, expensive customer support claims, and ultimately lost sales.

That’s why inventory updates need to happen in real-time. Retailers require a complete, 360-degree view across their entire inventory network to ensure they have accurate and up-to-date information on product availability—right down to the millisecond.

fabric OMS is a powerful enterprise solution that unlocks speed as a differentiator. With its event-based architecture, retailers can trust that their inventory data feeds are accurate as updates happen in real-time. This ultimately allows retailers to make accurate decisions based on their latest snapshots of inventory across the network.

Get instant data directly from the source

Instantaneous access to data is pivotal for speed. But traditional OMS vendors like Oracle ATG, Salesforce, and Manhattan can only sync data with a retailer’s e-commerce platform, instead of the actual source of the data. This outdated system for data syncing is not only slow, but it also introduces potential points of failure and errors.

fabric OMS is the first and only enterprise solution that completely bypasses a company’s commerce platform to communicate directly with e-commerce storefronts, giving retailers instantaneous updates from the source of truth. It stands out as a powerful enterprise solution that saves time, ensures swift and accurate data flow, and delivers fast performance.

Use lightning-quick APIs to boost conversion rates

At the heart of fabric OMS are lightning-quick storefront APIs, which facilitate rapid communication and data exchange between the online store and backend commerce systems. The integration of ultra-fast APIs and proprietary data harmonization capabilities allows for dynamic and real-time inventory and fulfillment updates to be reflected on the storefront and other real-time transactional systems as well.

Some important use cases include displaying accurate available-to-promise (ATP) inventory on product detail pages and allowing customers to place pre-orders or backorders. This not only provides a smooth and interactive shopping experience for customers, it also enhances conversion rates and streamlines inventory and order management.

Power operations with advanced order routing and order orchestration

Whether it’s a DC with extra stock, or a store that’s closest to a customer, or a warehouse that’s sitting idle with excess capacity, omnichannel retailers need to fulfill orders from optimal locations if they want to compete on speed. But being able to stand up and update order fulfillment logic without writing code is critical because it allows any retail operator to configure logic-based rules and route orders to where they need to go—without the need for developers.

With fabric OMS, operators can automate sourcing decisions by using conditional rules and specifying the closest or highest-ranking facility that is first in stock. If an order “bounces” it will automatically reallocate the order to a different location to swiftly fulfill the order. Additionally, input for fulfillment logic can be pulled from inventory data, product data, order data, and facility data, ensuring that your systems are always up to date.

From creation, to fulfillment, to billing, shipping, and post-purchase, fabric OMS also orchestrates the complete order life cycle from start to finish. In addition to handling each lifecycle event quickly, it also interacts seamlessly with other critical systems for fulfillment, such as shipping services, warehouse management systems, and ERPs, so that reconciliation across various technologies is quick and accurate.

Make speed a differentiator, at scale, with fabric OMS

With fabric OMS, large retailers have a unique opportunity to turn speed into a competitive advantage by getting more products to customers faster. By consolidating real-time inventory, direct communication to storefronts, lightning-quick APIs, order orchestration, and advanced order routing, into a single, user-friendly interface, fabric OMS accelerates order and inventory management for large enterprises and redefines the standard for fulfillment in omnichannel retail.

Interested in learning more about our market-leading order management solution? Feel free to reach out to us or you can stop by our booth at NRF 2024 to see a demo.

Umer Sadiq

CTO @ fabric. Previously software development @ Amazon and Williams Sonoma.