Order Management – General introduction

Among the other Oracle Siebel CRM modules, Order Management is one of the most used and requested. This is due to its employment in the sales process, across quote and order management processes. The advantages offered by Siebel CRM are the integration with back-office applications (for products, availability, orders, credit check, taxation, etc.) and automation (through various customizable workflows), as well as flexible support throughout the sales process.
Before getting to use it in the Sales process, it is important to prepare the grounds for Order Management usage. As a first step, it is necessary to set up a series of elements and their characteristics (not all of the following are mandatory): Accounts and Contacts, Salespeople, Products, Pricing and Catalogs, Shipping Information, Tax Calculations, Payment Terms, Inventory Locations, Order Types, Order Statuses, Product Selection Favorites, Activity Plan Tempaltes, Availability to Promise, Asset-Based Ordering.

There are also several changes to perform in the application such as Activating Workflows, customizing the Sales, Quote and Order processes, customizing the List of Values, etc.
Integrations with the Back-Office applications could be necessary as well, depending on the infrastructure. Among them:

• Quote and Order process integration assures correct quote/order status and communication among front and back-office departments;
• Product Availability - information is retrieved from third party applications;
• Credit-Check – indicates if the customer has enough credit for purchasing the product ;
• Taxation – facilitates tax calculation based on organization and customer location (taxation legislations).

Creating and managing the catalog establishes the structure of products and services in order to facilitate access definition and navigation. It employs Catalog, Category, Subcategory and Product elements to establish hierarchies.

Presentations can be adapted by customizing the Display Templates and attribute search can be implemented to facilitate finding of products based on their characteristics.
For facilitated products up and cross-selling, the Product Recommendations need to be set in place. Messages are created and related to products in order to indicate to the salesperson possible up-sell and cross-sell products. A score is used for categorizing recommendations based on their importance in comparison with other recommendations, facilitating viewing and decision of what recommendation to make.
One of the competitive characteristics of a company is its approach to the sales process. Oracle Siebel CRM supports variations in the quotes and order processes facilitating flexible adaptation thus the creation of competitive advantages. As part of the Order Management implementation process it is necessary to define and map such processes in order to construct the best application support. In this step it is also very important to take into consideration the company strategy, the difference between it and the “real” selling process carried on by the employees, and decide the best way to suit both, assuring change management and user-acceptance.

A special type of approach to ordering is the asset-based ordering process. It allows companies to create assets from client’s orders, to create quotes for new products and services based on existing assets, create quotes to modify existing products and services, modify existing open orders, manage an existing service and gain visibility into the asset life cycle.
Order Management is a complex Oracle Siebel CRM module.