Precise Order Promising

Enrich Customer Ordering Experiences

Order Management

Order fulfillment reliability is paramount in retail as it substantially impacts sales and customer satisfaction. Shoppers often prioritize how and when they will receive their items when making a purchasing decision, so precise promising is especially key. Customers typically want to understand fulfillment options early in their buying journey, even as soon as their initial product search. Precise order promises help retailers move from static day range promises (e.g., 5 to 7 days) to personalized and exact dates, which help increase sales conversions.

Modern order management systems must intelligently evaluate a growing set of variables to provide the accurate order promising that builds customer confidence. Manhattan Active Order Management is the only solution that combines accurate product availability, intelligent supply chain assessment and high-capacity, in-memory caching technology to provide precise, instantaneous order promising across all channels, at scale.

Accurate Product Availability

Manhattan Active Order Management provides a powerful, real-time, global view of perpetual inventory across every fulfillment location in a retailer’s enterprise, including in-transit, on-order and third-party owned/fulfilled inventory. It increases order promising precision by enabling retailers to quickly define and reconfigure global inventory views to match customers to the correct items when ordering.

Using Manhattan Active Order Management’s advanced constraint engine, retailers can establish and adjust rules around inventory availability based on factors such as selling channel, retail brand, delivery method, seasonality, store capacity/capability, inventory accessibility, inventory disposition, presentation stock rules, safety stock levels and much more. The result is hyper-accurate product availability, ready to be used to keep customer promises profitably.

Intelligent Supply Chain Assessment

Precise order promising involves more than product availability. Manhattan Active Order Management goes a step further by refining order promises while considering the operational capabilities of a retailer’s supply chain.

Leveraging machine learning developed from decades of experience, the solution continuously learns and adapts, automatically adjusting order promises using current and historical data from a retailer’s supply chain operations. Various factors are evaluated to adjust precision, including distribution center or store workloads, historical fulfillment carrier performance, and more.

For example, suppose a customer is considering a product that requires monogramming. Manhattan Active Order Management will dynamically determine the best fulfillment location to meet the customer promise, considering location workloads and shipping cutoff times. The application provides retailers with detailed analysis of the promising performance metrics, including algorithm configuration capabilities, to improve promising accuracy over time.

Manhattan Active Order Management also allows extensive configuration of distribution center and store location variables to provide the most accurate delivery promises possible. For example, retailers can define multiple carrier pickup times for a location, even specifying the cutoff time for standard, express and evening delivery at the distribution center. In doing so, promises are improved, and the system ensures that orders are optimally released for fulfillment.

Optimizing Store Pickup Promises

Manhattan Active Order Management provides enhanced logic to ensure customers place store pickup or delivery orders within a specific cutoff time. Each store in the fulfillment network can define pickup or delivery cutoff times by day of the week. This capability enables a retailer to add a message like “Order by 3:00 PM” for same-day pickup, so customers are informed when browsing the product details page or at checkout.

Providing Fulfillment Data at Search

Many shoppers start their buying journey with a product search. Retailers can gain a competitive advantage by providing a view into fulfillment options within search results, encouraging the shopper to proceed to further product discovery and checkout.

Manhattan Active Order Management is the only solution that provides native integration with Google Merchant Center for presenting order fulfillment promise data during search results across Google Search, YouTube, Maps, Discover and more. The software syndicates shipment data to Google to boost ecommerce conversion rates from Google sites. With this feature, customers see shorter and more accurate delivery windows to increase conversion and improve the ranking of a retailer’s products. This feature requires no implementation; instead, a retailer simply needs only to provide consent to Google and Manhattan to share shipment data, and its products will see improved treatment across Google sites.

Support Green Buying

Retailers can also leverage Manhattan Active Order Management’s promising capabilities to highlight “green” fulfillment options. Brands can show how different delivery options reduce carbon footprint of their deliveries, appealing to environmentally conscious customers and aligning with its own sustainability goals.  

• Provides precise order fulfillment promises throughout the customer buying journey to increase brand loyalty, boost conversion rates, and reduce cart abandonment.
• Advanced machine learning algorithms continuously learn and adapt to provide more precise delivery date promises by assessing multiple supply chain variables and factors.
• In memory caching technology enables the solution to scale to support more variables and handle increasing promising request volumes from digital commerce.
• Open APIs enable sale channel systems to display precise delivery and pickup dates across all fulfillment options directly on the product list and details page and throughout checkout.