About three years ago, some day, my boss asked me if I would like to work on Salesforce platform? Since 2010, I was working as (mainly) .NET developer and I was looking for something new. I said “yeah, why not?“. At that day, my Salesforce adventure has begun. I was working at Order Management System team (B2C OMS) thus Salesforce Order Management (SOM) was the product that I started working on until now.
I knew that Salesforce was -and still- famous for their CRM solutions but, today you can’t call Salesforce a CRM company, it’s more than that. Salesforce has already have commerce products, marketing products, analytic tools, integration platform, industry solutions and so on. Order Management product was one of the missing piece for building complete Commerce system. So I started exploring not only Order Management but the whole ecosystem to see the big picture.
Brief History
Salesforce Order Management is a new application of Salesforce and it is considered as a part of Commerce Cloud. 2020 was the year for general availability (GA). Before that, in 2019, I participated the pilot program and since that day, I’m working on Salesforce Order Management projects. I saw the very first days of Salesforce Order Management and also the company I work for, is a partner of Salesforce therefore I was able to reach all kind of resources relevant to Salesforce Order Management.
What is Salesforce Order Management?
Needless to say, Order Management encompasses everything behind the scene when a customer clicks the “Buy” button, means from the time customer submits an order to the time customer receives it, including payment capture, fulfillment, invoices, cancel, returns & refund, shipment and so on.
The entire order lifecycle includes stages such as packing and shipping for warehouse team, invoicing for billing team and services for customer agents. Salesforce Order Management offers a centralized place to handle all these processes from stages by offering beautiful UI/UX and powerful core features such as automated flows (including no-code/low-code), custom layouts and lists views, macros, queues, APIs, built-in analytics & reporting, highly customizable custom objects (database), caching and even a mobile app and a cloud marketplace with full of apps and solutions ready to be used!
Benefits of being in Salesforce ecosystem is; Salesforce Order Management is pre-connected to Salesforce Commerce Cloud (B2C, B2B, B2B2C), works with Salesforce CRM for a complete data record (run on the same physical platform and share a common data model). It natively supports Service Cloud for a single customer view of both order and transaction history and Salesforce Order Management can have integrations with external systems for pre-purchase and post-purchase experiences.
As you see, Order Management is just an application built on top of Salesforce core platform. Once you get the Salesforce Order Management license and do the necessary configurations (we will cover it in the next article) Order Management app will appear in the App Launcher as ready to be used. That’s why I started learning Salesforce platform features because Salesforce Order Management is just an application.
Salesforce Order Management Capabilities
The capabilities of Salesforce Order Management is growing fast with each update release (3 times a year). By the time you read this, you may see more features already covered by Salesforce. Some of the capabilities of Salesforce Order Management are:
- Order lifecycle, managed/unmanaged orders, multi channel support (commerce, marketplace, POS)
- Payment processing, auth, capture & refund, invoice & credit memo
- Order servicing, cancellation, reship, discounts, returns, return orders (RMA), exchanges and so on
- Order fulfillment, basic fulfillment, distributed order management (DOM), location-level inventory (OCI)*
- Taxation, VAT & gross support
- Exception management, process based exceptions and notifications
- Prebuilt reports, returns and cancellations, order summaries per day/month and total amount and so on
- Prebuilt flows, distributed order management, cancel & return, RMA
* This feature is available to users with an Omnichannel Inventory license
Salesforce Order Management & Ecosystem
To understand the Salesforce ecosystem, the best way is to look at the reference architecture or solution architecture diagrams. Architecture diagrams show how different parts of a system or solution fit together.
Reference architecture diagram represent subset systems or capabilities as layers that are most relevant to B2C retail domain. The sample diagram shows end-to-end solutions for the needs of customers through the entire process for retail domain.
Solution architecture diagrams show products interoperate with backend systems and how data is passed between them for retail domain.
Deep diving for all the layers/products of the diagrams would be redundant for the beginning. Therefore, I want to mention about the most popular and used products relevant to Salesforce Order Management:
- Service Cloud
Provides support by bringing order history and customer records in a centralized place. Customer agents are able to fulfill the customer’s post-purchase experiences. - Marketing Cloud
Allows to personalize marketing based on purchase, triggers transactional emails, track page views, searches and product views. - MuleSoft
Integration platform, provides API management and system integrations.
Additional Resources
It’s important to know where to look for resources or guides and staying up to date when you consider that Salesforce delivers updates three times a year.
- I highly recommend you to join (if the company you work is partner of Salesforce) Salesforce Order Management Partner Community chatter group for official announcements, news, documents and asking questions related to Salesforce Order management
- Salesforce Order Management Trailblazer Community Group
- Salesforce Order Management resources
- Salesforce Order Management developer guide
- Salesforce reference architecture gallery