Optimize Every Order: Master Distributed Order Management with KIBO

Transcript

We’re going to take a quick peek at the breadth of capabilities of KIBO’s distributed order management system that supports the most modern and demanding commerce routing and fulfillment use cases.

KIBO’s order management system, or OMS as we’ll refer to it in this demo, powers and equips a wide variety of business types across many verticals, such as apparel, wholesalers, distributors, specialty retailers, and more. But today, we’re going to focus on some of our OMS capabilities through the lens of a B2C omnichannel sporting goods retailer.

Note though, that we support other business models, such as B2C and B2B eCommerce as well. In this short demonstration, we’re going to see KIBO’s powerful toolset that spans enterprise grade localized inventory availability, mixed fulfillment type order creation, rules-based intelligent order routing and splitting logic, events and notifications, full-order editing, store fulfillment and returns, all through the path of a single cohesive consumer journey. We’re often recognized for our robust capabilities yet simplified user experience.

Let’s start by meeting Jordan. She’s an adventure seeker and loves being outdoors.

She lives in Denver, Colorado and enjoys buying new outdoor and sporting gear. She’s made plans for a backpacking trip with friends in the mountains this month and has just placed an order for her supplies for that trip.

Jordan’s particular about getting what she wants, where she wants it, and when she wants it. And because of this, she’s developed some loyalty with a particular sporting goods retailer, Mystic Sports.

They’re customer experience obsessed, and they’ve really been able to deliver on that promise, which is why Jordan keeps coming back.

Next, let’s meet Alex. Alex is a customer service representative that works for Mystic Sports. He really enjoys his job, particularly because he likes helping people solve issues.

He’s really happy with the CSR menus he navigates through in Mystic’s OMS system because it’s so easy and intuitive, which makes his role even more rewarding.

So let’s take a look at what has Alex so excited.

This is KIBO’s administrative UI.

For the purposes of this demonstration, we’re logged in as a super admin, but roles and permissions can be granularly configured for any user type, like our CSR Alex, a channel manager, an eCommerce operations person, finance, etc.

On the left-hand side, we’ll see the groupings of the core functionality, including the catalog, marketing tools, search, publishing, orders, subscriptions, fulfiller for stores and warehouses to pick, pack, and ship orders, order routing, customers, call center for CSRs to assist customers, and reporting.

You can also see the specific B2B capabilities here. As an API-first platform and a microservices-based solution, KIBO’s own administrative UI is built on the KIBO API.

So anything I demonstrate today can be done via API or from an external system.

Let’s pull up an order similar to the one Jordan placed earlier.

The initial view here is a list of all orders for this account, and we’ve got some nice filtering tools here if we need some help finding the right order.

Here’s an order just like the one Jordan placed earlier.

Looks like we’ve got everything we could expect to find here.

Customer information, channel information, the order’s finances, logs for events on the order, and an unlimited amount of configured custom data points that we could model. Let’s have a look at how things got routed.

Take note here that across these line items on a single order, we have store pickups, ship to home, and delivery from various locations.

These allocations were made based on the combination of available inventory and the business rules, defining the most cost effective and operationally efficient ways to do so. KIBO is strong when it comes to order orchestration and routing.

Next, I’ll navigate to KIBO’s inventory menu to demonstrate the tools available for managing real time and available to promise inventory.

Here we see inventory availability modeled across locations respective of individual location based safety stocks and inventory velocity metrics, network wide inventory floor, and existing allocations against on hand. KIBO’s inventory service allows for allocating against future known inventory, soft allocations for reserving items and cart for a specific time interval, digital segmentation of the inventory for certain fulfillment types, purchase channels, or other things.

KIBO also has optional fields for granular inventory entries like SKU, lot code, date, condition, and serial number.

KIBO allows for real-time inventory visibility, another strength. With real-time available inventory as the first criteria for allocation, the OMS consults the routing rules that were set up entirely by the business team at the individual channel level to define unique scenarios for how inventory should be allocated, how orders should be split or not split with scenario based criteria modeled as macro or micro as the business needs are going to require.

Users are also able to set up custom attributes for things like individual products, locations, customers, and orders, and filter off that information to configure custom logic within the routing engine, which is very powerful yet intuitive.

The order that Jordan placed hit these live ship-to-home routing rules and was routed to this distribution center or DCs as we’ll refer to them, and a few stores. So let’s look at why.

Mystic wants to prioritize single shipments when it can and prioritize DCs within five hundred miles. And when the preferred location can’t fulfill it entirely, allow it to look to the next closest location.

If no single location is available to fulfill the entire order, Mystic wants to split the order and start over at the beginning, again, trying to minimize shipping costs where it can.

Here we can see sorted by distance.

In other scenarios, we find prioritizations focused on fulfillment costs, including shipping and labor rates, and more.

Order routing is also used to set up rules defining where inventory should be transferred from. When a customer selects a store pickup location that does not have sufficient inventory on hand, these automated rules, which can be set up by business users, would be what causes the allocations on that order to fall exactly where they should between locations.

When this occurs, KIBO can automatically create transfer shipments and fire event notifications for the respective fulfillment locations, which is what occurred on this order we reviewed earlier.

Alex, our CSR, just received a phone call from Jordan regarding the order she just placed a bit ago. Seems she forgot to add something to her order and wants to do it now while she’s thinking about it. Alex can certainly help with that. First things first, let’s find that order. So Alex clicks into the call center menu over on the left. Once in the call center menu, Alex has options to search for specific orders, customer accounts, or returns.

He can search by any term, such as customer name, order number, shipment number, return number, etcetera.

If he searches order using Jordan’s name, he gets all of the orders she’s placed.

Once he confirms the order she’s referencing along with some other security information, he clicks on that order to further assist her.

Again, she’s looking to order another item and is wondering if it’s available at the same store she already has another pickup scheduled for. She’s also concerned about having to juggle multiple order numbers or verifications of pickup.

Alex could certainly create a new shipment under this order or even create a brand new order for Jordan if needed. Luckily for Jordan, however, Mystic is using KIBO’s configurable shipment release, meaning that Alex can add this item to the same order that Jordan placed, negating the need for a separate order. And with KIBO’s real time inventory, he can see that there is indeed plenty of that product available at her store.

Alex adds that to her order, asks if there’s anything else he can assist with, and moves on to the next customer. Problem solved.

Soon after, Jordan’s BOPIS order shows up in our store’s fulfillment queue. Diving into KIBO’s out-of-the-box fulfiller UI, we get that location’s view of orders to process across ship to home, store transfer, store pickup, and curbside pickup, each with its own unique workflow and process.

Ship-to-home orders allow for shipment consolidation, meaning multiple shipments can be combined during fulfillment, decreasing shipping costs and increasing customer satisfaction.

There are also SLAs defined, which allow store associates to focus on the orders that need immediate attention.

SLAs are fully configurable by the individual locations or groups of locations, meaning that meaningful targets can be set and metrics are captured fairly.

KIBO’s Fulfiller service is a fast, convenient, and easy interface to use in stores as it is browser based and responsive to all mobile devices.

It’s just as easily performed in the warehouse management system or POS via the KIBO API as well.

With Jordan’s order, the store employee worked the shipment through a set of guided fulfillment steps. First, accepting the shipment, then picking it from the floor into a product validation step. If inventory was inaccurate and we didn’t have that item to fulfill, we’ve got those scenarios handled here as well, whether that’s automatically transferring the merchandise or sending it back to customer service to coordinate an alternate pickup location with Jordan.

Luckily for Jordan, the real-time inventory information on the storefront site was accurate, and everything is in stock, so we move on to complete the validation and stage it for customer pickup.

Jordan was sent a text message alerting her that her products were ready, which is amazing. She wasn’t planning on coming until the next morning. Glad to know everything will be ready when she gets there.

The next morning, Jordan arrives at the store, and she’s a little frazzled. She didn’t get the early start she wanted and is feeling like she’s running a little late. She knows the store has her items ready to go, which is great, but she also has a return that she needs to process, and feels like this is going to put her even further behind.

She meant to initiate the return online and note that she would be returning in store, but forgot.

As she walks up to customer service, she lets them know that she is there to pick up an order, but is also needing to return an item. Luckily for her, the store is using KIBO’s OMS as well. The store associate retrieves her pickup items for her and then moves on to her return.

The associate heads back to the order screen, quickly finds the order for the return, and initiates the return from there. They find the item on the returns tab, see it as eligible for return, and then start the return process. She would like a refund.

Disposition is no longer wanted.

And then the return is initiated.

Restock to this store, head to the returns menu, receive the item back in after the store associate verifies the condition, of course.

This also adjusts the store inventory for this product in real time and initiate a refund back to the original payment method.

Before she knows it, Jordan is back on the road and almost back on time. Mystic Sports really is a great shopping experience for her every time, which is why she continues to be such a loyal customer. Now we’ve seen a lot in a very short period of time. A complete picture of real-time inventory fully exposed to the customer experience.

Complex inventory availability calculation mechanics, intelligent routing and splitting, an allocation decision engine, full full order editability, offline order creation, flexible omnichannel fulfillment, and returns, all in an easy to configure and consumable package built to empower business users to move at the pace of their customer expectations seamlessly.

KIBO customers can easily use order management data to power new customer experiences that drive revenue and loyalty.

Only KIBO gives teams a fast and easy way to unlock customer experiences for order management, such as real time inventory visibility, advanced order orchestration and routing, fulfillment optimization, call center and customer service, and subscriptions management use cases out of the box.

And while KIBO offers a wide set of capabilities, each of these components is completely modular and independently consumable and deployable, meaning KIBO’s composable architecture lets you implement only what you need, eliminating vendor lock in and ensuring the solution is future proof. As such, these capabilities can be used and sold together or individually.

Finally, KIBO’s market leading depth of capabilities out of the box, which we only got to see a small sample of today, combined with our unique managed extensibility, makes building and managing these complex commerce experiences fast and easy.

There’s a ton more of the platform that we just didn’t have time to cover today, so I encourage you to reach out and set up some time to discuss. Thanks for spending a few minutes with me today, taking a very quick flyover of Civo’s robust capabilities through the lens of an omnichannel retailer.

I look forward to connecting soon.

Take care.