Salesforce enhances Commerce Cloud With Lightning Order Management

Salesforce, one of the most innovative and comprehensive CRM solution providers, offers multiple tools that help users connect with their customers across different sales, service, marketing, and community channels. 

Until Salesforce introduced Lightning Order Management, there was a lack of integration layer that used to hurt companies to keep track of the orders and maintain the entire order management process to run smoothly and seamlessly.

Recently, Salesforce announced the Lightning Order Management tool.

Luke Ball, Vice President of Salesforce Product Management, said: “This is a new product developed on the Salesforce Lightning platform to enable the customers to scale, manage, and maintain their orders in a seamless way“. Luke added Lightning Order Management is often the most overlooked part of the sales process, but it’s one of the important aspects in order to provide the personalized experience users try to give to their customers.

“We think about advertising, acquisitions, and awareness, and we think of creating amazing, compelling commerce experiences on the storefront or on your website or in your app, but I think many brands don’t really think about the delivery experience as part of that customer experience,” he said.

The biggest problems of order management faced by organizations are:

1. The entire process till now involves so many different systems in addition to internal and external stakeholders.
2. Any attempt to integrate the system into a coherent system is generally much harder than it appears, especially when it includes aging legacy systems.

The Salesforce solution is made up of different parts such as data services, artificial intelligence, and robust APIs. For beginners, there is an Order Life Cycle Management that Ball pointed out as the brain of operations. “This is the basic logic of the order management system, anything that extends commerce beyond the “buy “button – supply chain management, order fulfillment, payment collection, billing, stock availability, and custom business logic – that’s the core of the order management system“, Ball said.

While working on Salesforce Lightning Order Management App Picker, customers can create visual order workflows. They can switch between systems in an App Picker, and the information is shared between Salesforce Commerce Cloud and Salesforce Service Cloud so that they can carry information when they migrate from sales to service.

According to Ball, Salesforce recognizes that the system is designed to work with third-party tools from other vendors. However, these external tools will not be displayed in the App Picker. He also mentioned that this process involves third-party vendors, such as shipping companies, who offer specific integration apps for Lightning Order Management in the Salesforce AppExchange.

Currently, the tool is in the beta stage and will be launched in February 2020.