June 2022: Product Releases
fabric’s Product Release Blog highlights some of the recent product releases and enhancements we’ve made so you can stay up to date on what’s new. This June edition is focused on the brand new features of fabric OMS:
Meet the New fabric OMS
Customer experience is arguably the most important thing in retail. Loyalty is difficult to build and maintain in today’s world where the options are unlimited, and attention spans are short. If customers visit your digital store and find that their favorite products are frequently out of stock, they will switch to another store with availability, and you will lose the revenue opportunity. In our recent release of OMS, team fabric focused on solving the inventory problem first. This edition of our product release blog covers some of the key features and use cases related to this release.
Sell Omnichannel Inventory
In connected retail, your inventory can be parked at multiple sources such as distribution centers, stores, and suppliers. fabric OMS aggregates a real-time view of on-shelf, in-transit, and on-order inventory across channels and provides you with a 360-degree view. You can display this information on the product detail page by connecting fabric OMS with a digital store such as Vue Storefront or fabric Storefront.
The Results: Lower stockouts, higher customer trust, and therefore higher conversion rate on your e-commerce store. You can also use this information to optimize distribution, bring efficiency in picking, packing, and shipping, and make intelligent purchase decisions.
What else?
You can now display local inventory in the nearby stores to enable Buy Online and Pick Up In-Store (BOPIS) on your digital storefront.
You can enable pre-ordering to build hype, gauge demand, and adjust inventory levels in preparation for a new product or service launch. Also, accept backorders from customers by displaying the inbound inventory on the storefront to keep your loyal customers.
As well as display low inventory on the storefront to shoppers to create urgency and drive conversion.
Control Inventory Sourcing and Distribution
With the latest release of fabric OMS, it is easier to set business rules to control the availability of stock to sell in each channel, market, or region. fabric OMS has introduced a simple three-step process to create inventory networks – 1) add basic information, 2) set up rules for items and locations, and 3) connect the inventory source. Retailers and brands can also use Inventory APIs to pool inventory across stores and brands by aggregating inventory data from upstream systems such as an ERP.
You can now manage the inventory sources — not only your warehouses — but also other first or third-party locations. The “Warehouse” module in the OMS submenu is now replaced by “Locations”. This helps us expand the module’s definition to include custom locations that can be used downstream to manage inventory and fulfillment.
You are no longer constrained by the standard location attribute set and create your own locations. With this update, you can turn on or off fulfillment locations depending on the changing business conditions — all with simple configurations in the fabric Copilot.
As part of the latest release, you can also set safety stocks for reorder points.
Extend the Data Model
Every business is unique in its own way and may have different requirements. Therefore, we take extensibility and integrations very seriously. With the latest release of fabric OMS, you can now create custom attributes.
Custom attributes appear along with a customer’s order on the Order Detail page to help you serve their customers better. For example, if a customer chooses gift wrapping as a part of their order, it will be shown on the Order Details page for more efficient order management. You can also create validations such as data types (Boolean or String) for the custom attributes.
We know that hand-off between systems is one of the biggest friction points in e-commerce operations. With the latest AWS EventBridge backend changes, creating a new product in fabric PIM or any other PIM now automatically triggers the creation of a new product in OMS when activated. The event is detected by our handler on the Copilot business layer, allowing us to take the SKU, itemID, and title and import the information via the inventory service.
And There’s More…
It is now easier than ever to create and update return and cancellation policies for business users. Just use the Settings menu on your fabric OMS Copilot screen and go to Returns and Cancellations. Intuitively configure business rules and set up automatic returns for those no-brainer situations. Your customers will love it.
Finally, export order data and import it to a BI or data visualization system for further analysis.
Developer Resources
Product marketing @ fabric. Previously @ Accenture and Infosys.
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