Analyst Insight: The last two years have seen a rush to provide store fulfillment services - similar to the efforts to deploy e-commerce FCs back in 1998-2000. To date, store fulfillment initiatives have largely been tactical, technology-driven initiatives chartered to leverage existing applications-integration in order to support “save the sale" functionality as well as offload growing FC volumes to the retail store. The coming years will experience a "financial-efficiency" driven effort to maximize profit margin and optimize network inventory efficiency under the new age of constrained IT investment. – Kevin Hume, Principal, Tompkins International
What is distributed order management? What has changed in global markets that makes it a desirable capability? Satish Kumar, vice president of client services and technology with Softeon, has the answers.