Create an Order Management System In 3 Steps
How to Quickly Create an Order Management System
Managing multiple orders can be overwhelming, with the constant need to accurately track products, suppliers, shipments, and order details around the clock. This demanding task often leads to challenges such as sales losses, excess inventory costs, and delays in order processing and fulfillment. But what if there were a simpler, more effective way to manage your orders?
An efficient order management system (OMS) can address these challenges, but often, off-the-shelf software solutions fall short or are too complex, especially for SMEs. We’re here to guide you on how to implement an order management system that gives you all the essentials, plus full customizability.
Why You Need an Order Management System
An Order Management System (OMS) streamlines sales, inventory, and fulfillment processes—saving time, reducing errors, and improving customer satisfaction.
Managing orders effectively is essential for companies, regardless of whether they are traditional mom-and-pop stores, brick-and-mortar or e-commerce businesses. Dissatisfied customers, lost sales, or untrackable orders are the top concerns for all business owners. A great reputation is often built through word of mouth, and getting products to customers quickly and reliably is essential. That’s why fast and accurate order processing is crucial for maintaining a positive reputation. Without it, negative word of mouth can quickly spread.
An efficient order management system minimizes errors and ensures customer satisfaction and loyalty. With a reliable order management system in place, you can streamline operations, boost customer loyalty, attract more repeat business, and receive positive reviews, all of which are essential for long-term success.
Access Our Ready-To-Use Order Management System
Effortlessly track orders, payments, and customer details with our scalable, feature-rich Order Management System. Streamline workflows and maintain full visibility over every transaction.
Why Excel Doesn’t Work For Order Management
Many stores and e-commerce businesses rely on the backends of their website to handle their order management. This works on a small scale, but they struggle to handle large volumes of orders, complex inventory management, and high transaction loads without performance issues. Moreover, e-commerce backends don’t support advanced features like stock alerts, automated reordering, and multi-location inventory tracking. More often than not, order data gets exported from the e-commerce backend and shared as spreadsheets to other departments.
Unfortunately, Excel is even less suitable for effective order management. While spreadsheets can serve basic order management needs, they present several significant drawbacks.
Human errors in data entry can escalate into major issues, and the lack of clear ownership or version control means that changes made by different team members can easily be lost or duplicated, especially if the responsible individual leaves the company.
As your reporting requirements expand, so do your spreadsheets, leading to slower performance and making it increasingly difficult to find specific order items. This inefficiency often results in wasted time and resources.
Spreadsheets also fall short in providing adequate security features to protect against unauthorized access. Tools like Excel and Google Sheets lack support for user roles, authentication, and granular access control. In contrast, our ready-to-use order management system offers robust security features and supports role-based access control, ensuring that everyone can only see what they need to see.
Overall, relying on spreadsheets for order management undermines the objective of maintaining a single, reliable source of truth.
Instead of achieving efficient order management, you end up juggling multiple spreadsheets, constantly managing and correcting errors. Transitioning to a dedicated order management system not only enhances efficiency and accuracy but also significantly improves overall business operations.
Why Creating an Order Management System Is Now Easy
There are several ways to build your order management system. You can code it from scratch, purchase an off-the-shelf solution that may not fully adapt to your specific needs, or use a web application builder like Five, which specializes in order management systems.
Using a builder like Five gives you the ability to add features tailored to your operation to an existing OMS that has all the essentials.
1. Bring Your Own Order Data
Five allows you to transfer your data from Excel or Google Sheets to your new cloud-based order management system.
2. Hit The Ground Running With a Ready-To-Use OMS
You can set up your order management system in minutes, avoiding the hundreds of hours required to learn various coding frameworks and languages. This rapid deployment ensures you can start improving your operations immediately.
3. Customization
Unlike off-the-shelf systems that lack flexibility, Five lets you add custom features to meet your specific requirements. If you need unique functionalities, our ready-to-use OMS can accommodate them, ensuring your system fully supports your operations.
4. Advanced Features
Five provides the ability to create custom business logic with code, generate order-related PDF reports, and visualize your data through custom charts and graphs. These advanced features help you manage and analyze your orders more effectively.
5. Notifications
You can set up email notifications for order status updates, stock levels, and other critical alerts, keeping you organized and preventing issues like stockouts or delayed shipments.
By starting with Five’s ready-to-use OMS, you set the foundation for a customized order management system that enhances your operations and adapts to your unique needs. This approach ensures your order management processes are efficient, accurate, and scalable. And best of all, with our affordable monthly rates, you’re not breaking the bank in order to get started!
Steps to Create an Order Management System
Last but not least, we will introduce you to the steps of building an entire order management system from scratch. In this step-by-step guide, we’ll focus on taking your previous spreadsheet data and building your order management system.
If you don’t have a previous spreadsheet, that’s even better. With a clean slate, you can start working in our ready-to-use Order Management System, ensuring clean data capture from the get-go.
PS: Even if you have existing order data, using our pre-built application will save you dozens of hours of development work!
Step 1: Prepare Your Data
Before building our order management web app, it’s crucial to format your spreadsheet correctly so that it’s ready for use by a software application. Unlike spreadsheets, software required structured data, ideally set up in a relational schema.
Here are some of the key preparation steps:
Descriptive Header Row
Ensure the first row of your spreadsheet contains descriptive names for each column. For example, columns might be labeled as “Product”, “Price”, and “Quantity”.
Avoid Redundant Columns
Do not repeat information across multiple columns. For instance, instead of having separate columns for “Products (non-perishable)” and “Products (perishable)”, use one “Product” column and another for “Perishable/Non-Perishable”.
Single Data Points
Each cell should contain only one piece of data. Avoid combining information such as “5.99 (discounted to 4.99)”.
Separate Multiple Values
If an item has multiple values, like several email addresses, use separate columns for each (e.g., “Primary Email”, “Secondary Email”).
Order Data – Our Cheat Sheet and Checklist
Here are the three most useful Excel commands for cleaning data:
- TRIM: Removes extra spaces from text entries.
- CLEAN: Deletes non-printable characters.
- PROPER: Capitalizes the first letter of each word and converts the rest to lowercase.
Last, make sure your data fulfills these criteria before you proceed:
✅ The header row contains descriptive names.
✅ Columns have unique and relevant information.
✅ Each cell contains one piece of data.
✅ Multiple data points are split across columns.
✅ Data is cleaned using Excel functions.
Step 2: Setting Up Your Database and Importing Data
Now that your spreadsheet is prepared, let’s move on to setting up your order management system using Five.
First, we need to set up a database, i.e. a place to store your order management data. Our ready-to-use order management system comes with a fully built-out relational database that lets you store all essential information, such as:
Order Data
Products, Customer, Payment, Delivery Status, etc.
Customer Data
Names, Contact, Shipping Addresses, etc.
Products
Product Descriptions, Stock Quantity, Locations, etc.
By using a properly structured database, we are also unlocking the potential of long-term analytics. For example, once you start working with our OMS, it will be easy to ask important questions such as:
- What was my overall order volume and value in Q1 of this year?
- How does my order volume and value compare to the same period last year?
- Who are my best customers?
- What are my top-selling products?
Structured data and a clean order management database are the first prerequisites to successful order management.
Step 3: Define Your Order Workflow
Storing order data properly is the first step to successful order management. The next step is to think about your order workflow. For example, who should be notified once an order is placed or paid? And which department should have access to what?
In our ready-to-use order management system, there are two user roles:
- Sales Managers, who can create customers, orders and products inside the database.
- Warehouse Managers or Fulfilment, who get notified of paid orders that are ready to be shipped.
Order information flows seamlessly and fully automatically between these two roles, making order fulfillment smooth, traceable and trackable. Each user role also comes with data access rights. For example, the fulfilment team cannot delete an order – they can only see paid orders and mark them as shipped.
Bonus: Best Practices for OMS Success
Every business has its own way of managing orders. The best way to professionalize your order management is by starting with an order management system that ticks all the boxes when it comes to essential features: storing data, managing the workflow and setting up for scalability.
With a system in place, you can then start to customize and adapt. For example, if your Order Management System should send out automatic email notifications to customers whenever an order is shipped, this can be added as a feature.
A good way to manage these extensions and new features is to set up a priority list: which features are essential, which ones are nice-to-have, and which ones can be implemented at a later stage? Equipped with such a list, you can gradually tailor your Order Management System to meet your requirements. This ensures OMS success without overwhelming your organization!
