Order Management Solution?

Hi, I'm trying to figure out what Small-Medium size Business Owners look for in an Order Management Solution. I recently joined a backend order management company, and am not looking to advertise in any way or sell people, but I am wanting to best service our customers and to do that would like to understand what is needed in an order management system. I also would like to know the general pains that lead to seeking out an order management system.

I am new to the industry and not all that technical and therefore any specifics would be of huge help.

Thank you a ton!

I thought instead of ranting about what I do want in an order management system I thought I would share some big cons about a couple existing systems.

Two cons about the Stone Edge order management system...

1) A very ugly user interface... while this interface may be fine for a tech savvy person it is intimidating to someone who has not used a computer before (something that is not unusual for a small company that cannot afford to hire experienced help).

2) The software is implemented on Microsoft Access. To use Stone Edge the end user must purchase Microsoft Access licenses which also makes a Microsoft Windows license a requirement. Also, Microsoft Access is far from the best choice of databases in a multi-user environment.


One con about the Interapptive's ShipWorks order management system...

1) Does not support payment gateways. So you cannot charge or credit customers from ShipWorks.


One giant reason to completely stay away from NetSuite...

1) NetSuite is an expensive solution that is very buggy and if you come across a bug that slows your company down you will have to wait a long time for it to be fixed (if it ever gets fixed). After you find a bug and report it to NetSuite it takes a few months for them to acknowledge that a fix is needed (not all bugs will be acknowledged). After the bug is acknowledged it is put on a very long list of bugs sorted by priority and there is a chance your bug will never see the light of day on this list. While NetSuite is a great idea... it just does not work.

I was formerly a principal of a company that sold thousands of access based accounting applications. I can say that it is fairly easy for Access to get corrupt in a multi-user environment. see http://www.microsoft.com/technet/pro....mspx?mfr=true

The good news is that Access databases are simple to repair and data loss is very rare (based on my experience).

Access programs running SQL via ODBC do not have the performance of a client/server application as they will run slower but are also less prone to corruption (but can also corrupt since access is still doing the processing on the client). As Barney stated bugs found in an Access program can be found and fixed much faster than a more complex language like .NET which can be a big plus in some situations.

Barney, if you compile up the access program as a MDE file then it can run with the freely distributable access runtime. There are some tradeoffs (like no access to the code), but it does run a bit faster. If you go that route I highly recommend using the SageKey products http://www.sagekey.com/

From my experiance, Access based apps are great in low user, low volume situations. With that said I think its great for a order managment system that allows another application to do most of the high volume processing (i.e. a web cart) then just processes the resulting orders.

Sincerely,

I've finally got around to looking at this again. I have a setup like the one elbweb proposes above. To recap, there's a table which holds orders, linked to an order_details table by ID number. This is because each order can consist of multiple lines (so each line is in order_details, linked to a single entry where the order number is allocated in the orders table).

I need my system to print delivery notes. Deliveries may consist of:

1) All items from an order
2) Only some lines from an order
3) Some/all lines from multiple orders.

I need a way in my database to be able to identify which items should are ready for delivery, and print the delivery note for them. This will involve creating a record in the delivery notes table with the date and delivery note number in it, then entering the order_detail_ID for each item into a delivery_details table with the delivery note number alongside it. Once that's done, a delivery note report can be run to create and print the note with all the required items on it. I hope this makes sense so far - it's difficult to explain, so please let me know if you're not following me!