IMI Distributed Order Management and Fulfillment

IMI Order is a distributed order management (DOM) solution that globally manages orders across multiple inventory locations, suppliers, partners, customers and channels. It enables companies to maintain full control over the order lifecycle driving increased profits, shortened lead times and streamlined logistics processes.

With uniform visibility and control of inventory and orders and a single face to your customer, you can quickly and easily satisfy individual order requirements. IMI Order improves the flexibility, responsiveness and speed of order processing while ensuring the most efficient, cost-effective means for you and for your customers.

IMI Order is flexible, yet strong enough to support the high volume, complex demands of the retail value chain. With the following key capabilities, you can effectively allocate and prioritize orders, assign inventory and distribute product based on availability and customer-specific constraints.

Flexible Supply Modes: When a customer places an order, IMI Order automatically selects the optimal supply mode per individual customer order line. The selection is made based on product type and inventory location. The following four supply modes are supported on the same order:

• Stock order from warehouse direct to customer
• Stock order transit from different warehouse
• Special order drop ship from vendor to customer
• Special order transit from vendor to internal warehouse prior to shipment to customer

Global Inventory Management

IMI Order leverages one repository for all stock locations across the company. The global inventory control function enables a company to more effectively balance safety stock and economic order quantities with customer service levels. IMI Order supports vendor managed inventory (VMI) and continuous replenishment planning (CRP) where the company takes full responsibility for monitoring and managing a customer’s stock with satisfactory inventory levels by automatically creating new customer orders as required.

Global Order Management

Core to IMI Order is a set of comprehensive organizational, customer and product profiles. Business rules are set up to handle specific business criteria such as multi-national currencies and languages or even industry and legal regulations. When managing separate legal entities, global visibility of operations is consistently maintained in the system. The order manager enables a global view of product availability across warehouses and suppliers with accurate available-to-promise (ATP) and other critical information.

Order-Line Independence

The order line independence concept in IMI Order allows different supply modes to be mixed on a purchase and/or customer order (multi-sourcing) and shipments made to different ship-to parties (multi-shipping). Each order line contains information about products, logistics and profits. The different lines are managed independently from the whole order in terms of product sourcing, delivery and billing.

Pricing and Promotions Management:

Pricing and promotions capabilities within IMI Order are offered and calculated at the individual order line level to more effectively manage margins and profitability. Complete pricing information down to item and customer-specific pricing according to different agreements is readily available for effective negotiations.

Purchase Order Management

The purchase order functionality in IMI Order manages many different supply modes for the same order. It also handles special and rush orders and has the capability to consolidate items for shipping to help minimize transportation costs.

Returns Management

The IMI Suite handles reverse logistics activities in an extremely efficient and flexible way with the ability to handle returns and claims processes for sellable products, load carriers and packing materials, advance ship notices (ASNs) and proof of deliveries (PODs). Returns management provides a web-based external portal for a simple, standard communication platform between two companies. The returns portal is available for the entry and acceptance of a customer return order plus several query features. The intuitive design guides customers through the necessary steps for a streamlined returns process.