The global B2B e-commerce market size is valued at more than $6.6 trillion, which is approximately six times larger than the B2C market and is expected to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 18.7% from 2021 to 2028, as per Grand View Research. The COVID-19 pandemic is further expected to accelerate the growth of online businesses.
Despite the large market size, fast paced growth, and complex business operations in the B2B commerce space, the focus of most enterprises have largely remained towards optimizing the B2C commerce customer experience.
The objectives of B2B e-commerce solutions are typically different than those of B2C. The relationship with the B2B customers tends to be long-term, recurring in nature, and has a higher incentive or penalty at stake.
The B2B order management solution is an integral part of the B2B commerce space that forms the foundation for managing seamless B2B business operations. The selection of a B2B OMS, its implementation, and its short-term or long-term value is not often straightforward. These items can vary based on the business domain, scale of business, and business trends.
Core B2B Order Management Objectives
Apart from the software selection for implementation, the B2B Order Management Solution for any organization should be designed to primarily serve the following key objectives:
Predictability
The solution should contribute to the predictability of the supply and demand for all the collaborators upstream and downstream in the supply chain. This can be achieved by providing near-real-time visibility beyond just supply and demand to include exception events.
For example, one of the primary reasons for inefficiency in the supply chain is caused by variance in the procurement and fulfillment lead times for SKUs. The implementation of a B2B OMS solution should consist of classifying SKUs with greater impact to business and defining business rules to identify the events causing the variance. Additionally, the successive phases should focus on sharing this information with the collaborating entities for effectively managing these exceptions.
Flexibility
The implementation should be flexible to accommodate vendor specific requirements and handle complex order management workflows.
For example, various SKU Categories, Order Types, Transportation Modes, etc. often require different order process flows and handling. All aspects of the order life cycle from procurement to sales, including handling of delays, discrepancies, vendor claims, and rebates should be automated requiring minimal manual intervention. Furthermore, it is also critical to reduce the vendor onboarding time to support competitive and fast-growing business.
Measurable Impact
The solution should contribute a measurable impact on business parameters and provide a return on investment in the form of improved operational efficiency.
For example, overall inventory stock should be optimized with the improvement of:
- On Hand to Promised Stock ratio
- Order Fill Rate
- Order Cycle Time
- Order Claims Rate
- On-Time-In-Full (OTIF)
In Summary
The B2B OMS is the engine in the B2B commerce space. A B2B OMS ideally should have elements of all the above listed capabilities for managing complex business rules, synchronizing inventory across multiple channels, seamlessly handling the order life cycle, tracking the vendor performance, and overseeing supply chain efficiency.
How Can YANTRA Commerce Help?
YANTRA Commerce has helped standardized the B2B order management space and enabled global inventory visibility for a variety of different Fortune 500 companies across 130 divisions, 12,000 distributors, and 290 DC while handling 100k+ SKUs with their multiple combinations.
To learn more about how YANTRA Commerce can help you optimize your B2B Commerce Solution requirements please contact us here. Our team consists of top industry resources who have collectively executed over 100 projects in the supply chain domain in the last decade. We collectively have over 300 years of experience in the Supply Chain Management, Inventory Management, and Logistics Management business functions.
About the Author, Abhishek Mishra
Abhishek is a Supply Chain Consultant with 18 Years of experience in implementing and optimizing e-commerce, B2B commerce, multi-channel order fulfillment, and inventory management solutions for some of the world’s leading organizations to help them improve their order and inventory management operations.