IBM Sterling Order Management System product overview
Brands with omnichannel fulfillment options can generate up to 30% more revenue by reducing lost sales while still building customer advocacy. Sterling Order Management System makes it possible for you to eliminate barriers to global inventory visibility and offer your customers omnichannel fulfillment options. These options allow your customers to buy anywhere, pick up anywhere, and return anywhere. Whether your customers are in store, on the web, or on a mobile device, they can seamlessly traverse channels throughout all phases of the order lifecycle.
- Manage orders across any, and all channels, for a ‘single source of truth’.
- Use inventory and service capacity details to schedule delivery and installations.
- Create and track purchase orders for linked purchase to order items.
- Use pro-active monitoring and exception management to raise alerts when something needs attention.
Watch this video to understand how IBM Sterling Order Management System provides configurable features for order capture, including real-time inventory, through fulfillment to final delivery, powering customer experiences that grow sales while improving profitability.
Features and benefits
IBM Sterling Order Management System provides business user tools and e-commerce features for faster and easier store and site management and multichannel fulfillment. These tools can help you accelerate your time to market and help drive revenue growth. IBM Sterling Order Management System is more than just a product pushed to the cloud. This solution offers the following features:- Customer onboarding processes.
- Rapid environment provisioning and deployment processes.
- Maintenance updates
- Backup and disaster recovery services.
- Scalability support for unexpected burst capacity to deliver optimal performance during peak times.
- Infrastructure and performance built on established technology for B2C and B2B commerce.
- Always-available IBM SaaS support of infrastructure, operating systems, application servers, database, and software.
- Order management and global inventory visibility to give customers what they want, where, and when they want it.
- Provides an omnichannel foundation for all commerce interactions.
- Offers greater efficiency by orchestrating the fulfillment of products and services across all selling channels.
- Uses aggregated inventory information to efficiently fulfill orders and improve the customer experience.
Integrated, flexible fulfillment
- Includes an intelligent sourcing engine that uses configurable processes to automate decisions on sourcing that follow your business rules.
- Uses any inventory in any location to efficiently manage order orchestration across internal and external sources of supply.
- Enables transfers in stock-out situations.
- Selects a new location if inventory is no longer available for the order.
- Sources or drop-ships from channel partners.
- Determines complex fulfillment that follows your order splitting rules as needed to complete any
of the following fulfillment options:
- Fulfill by Line
- Fulfill by suppliers
- Fulfill by different internal systems
IBM Sterling Order Management System subscription includes the following features and components:
Environments
Category | Standard product includes |
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Production environment |
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Disaster recovery |
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Preproduction environment |
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Quality assurance environment |
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Development environment |
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Security
IBM Sterling Order Management System is hosted in a secured data center and is ISO-27001, ISO-27017 and ISO-27018 certified. It is operated with Data-in-Motion-Encryption (DIME) and Data-at-Rest-Encryption (DARE). IBM Sterling Order Management System does not store sensitive personal information (SPI) or PCI data. If customer payments collection is required, use a punch-out payment or iFrame-based mechanism to IBM Payment Systems or any other PCI-compliant payment server provider for processing payments and storing payment data. Tokens referencing the payments can be held within IBM Sterling Order Management System.
Data center locations
- Dallas, Washington (US)
- Frankfurt, Amsterdam (EU)
- Sydney01, Sydney02 (ANZ)
Backup and Disaster Recovery
A daily backup of database and agent/application server data is taken and retained as per IBM policy.
IBM Sterling Order Management System provides disaster recovery to restore the production environment from a catastrophic failure.
Monitoring
IBM Sterling Order Management System is monitored to ensure up time of the infrastructure and the application. IBM treats any detected production application unavailability as a Severity 1 support case and then triage the issue.
Maintenance windows
IBM Sterling Order Management System has a weekly scheduled maintenance window that is used for infrastructure and application updates, and also for the continuous improvement of the security posture of the product. You can view the update schedule for your environment in the event calendar of the Self Service.
IBM Sterling Order Management System also reserves a quarterly maintenance window that is used for deploying OS and middleware security patches and for maintaining network infrastructure. These maintenance windows may result in the system downtime, which is communicated to the customers with one week prior notice. The downtime duration and maintenance schedule are published through email notification for each maintenance window. To receive these notifications, refer to Distribution list for email notifications.
For a non-critical quarterly OS maintenance, IBM Support sends notification to the registered addresses at least one week in advance. After you receive the notification, ensure to avoid any deployment or business event running in the maintenance window. This is because, there is a possibility of rolling out rebooting in the window, which might slow down the progress of your deployment or business event. The OS maintenance begins with a non-production (Dev, QA, or pre-production) environment. After that, you or SI teams have one week's time to complete the testing and monitoring of your non-production environment, and verify whether the new OS patch does not impact your business. If you notice any issue, open a ticket immediately to notify IBM before they begin the OS maintenance patch on production environment. Similarly, after the completion of OS maintenance patch on production, verify that your business processes are working fine. If you encounter any issue, open a ticket with IBM.
IBM Sterling Order Management System may need to respond to security vulnerabilities that require the immediate deployment of patches and in some cases, system downtime for the patches to be effective. The critical nature of these vulnerabilities precludes the ability of IBM Sterling Order Management System to provide a week prior notice to customers. In such rare instances, IBM Sterling Order Management System reserves the right to schedule the deployment of patches within a short time, as little as one day prior notice.
Infrastructure and support
Product support manages each CASE on a case by case basis. It is up to the client and systems implementation team to manage all of the CASES and request and manage any escalations. IBM Sterling Order Management System engages the appropriate implementation team for any issues with customizations.
Updates and availability
IBM Sterling Order Management System provides monthly security patches and quarterly feature enhancements.
IBM Sterling Order Management System provides an uptime SLA of 99.9%.
IBM Client Success Manager
An IBM Client Success Manager is a named IBM resource who provides post implementation relationship management, with a focus on helping you meet business goals. The IBM Client Success Manager's primary goal is to ensure that your client experience is consistent and rewarding.
The IBM Client Success Manager develops a deep understanding of your environment, business objectives, operational metrics and stays with you throughout your lifecycle as a client to help you improve product usage and feature adoption.
Other solution features and add-on components
- Store Engagement Add-on
- Call Center Add-on
- Supply Collaboration Add-on
- Delivery and Service Appointments Add-on
- Configurator Add-on
- Pricing Add-on
- Quoting Add-on
Other third-party integrations
IBM Sterling Order Management System allows external integrations with ISV solutions. You can also choose to integrate with other external back-end systems like an ERP or fulfillment systems and front-end solutions such as e-commerce websites and call centers. The integrations must follow certain standards.
- Quoting
- Catalog
- Configurator
- Delivery and service scheduling
- Supply collaboration
- Commerce call center
- Store inventory
- Store associate
Implementation services
- Requirements gathering and design
- Data and content loading
- Configure and customize business process flows
- Customize third-party integrations
- Testing and deployment
- Training
- Service launch
- Upgrade deployment and testing, which includes modification of customizations
- Performance testing
Not included services
The product does not include the SFTP server for data extract and email server. The product provides both file-based and containerized developer toolkit. But they must be downloaded from the Self Service. For more information, contact your IBM sales representative.
For more information
To learn more about the IBM Sterling Order Management System, contact your IBM sales representative.