IBM Sterling Order Management System product overview

IBM® Sterling Order Management System helps you to deliver a seamless order management experience across all channels. With Sterling Order Management System, you can enhance cross-channel efficiencies, and improve and streamline complex order management and fulfillment operations across your internal commerce systems.

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.

Sterling Order Management System provides a single view into all orders and inventory to improve inventory usage and provide accurate order promise dates. This capability enables true omnichannel services for B2C and B2B businesses. With Sterling Order Management System, your users can complete the following order and fulfillment tasks:

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.

Depending on the service offerings that you include within your IBM Sterling Order Management System solution, IBM Sterling Order Management System also provides the following benefits:

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
Production environment	An environment where the final application is deployed and service is made available to the user. This environment has 24x7 IBM Support after the site is live.
Disaster recovery	A standard process ran to ensure continued production traffic in the unlikely event of a disaster. Available with different RTO and RPO options: 48-hour RTO and 24-hour RPO. 4-hour RTO and 2-hour RPO.
Preproduction environment	An environment where your operations team or System Integrator does a final validation before deployment to production. The client is responsible for performance testing.
Quality assurance environment	An environment where you and your implementation team perform quality assurance testing and user acceptance testing (“UAT”). Additionally, you and your implementation team perform integration and scalability tests in this environment.
Development environment	An environment where your implementation team installs deployable artifacts and runs module testing. Supports developer integration testing.

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

The following data center locations are used for IBM Sterling Order Management System cloud services.

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.

Note: Storage and backup management adheres to ISO-27001 Annex A.11.2.7 “Secure disposal or re-use of equipment” policies and procedures. This ensures that the restoration and reuse of storage media is in compliance with the highly secure DoD 5220.22-M wiping standard, that is, the media is returned to a known “clean” state before it is reused in the data center.

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 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.

For instance, you can integrate with third-party service providers to gain or enhance the following capabilities:

Quoting
Catalog
Configurator
Delivery and service scheduling
Supply collaboration
Commerce call center
Store inventory
Store associate

Implementation services

You can engage with either IBM Services or an IBM Business Partner for implementation assistance. IBM outlines a sequence of steps to easily design, create, and start IBM Sterling Order Management System. The implementation activities are performed by IBM Services or an IBM Business Partner through a statement of work. The key implementation activities are as follows:

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.