Dear omnichannel community,
SAP's
Omnichannel Article Availability and Sourcng (aka OAA) solution for omnichannel retailers is a great success and used by many retailers across the globe for high-volume stock availability determination across distribution centers (DC's), stores, vendors and 3rd party warehouses, omnichannel order sourcing and reservation of ordered stock.
While the OAA capabilities are an elemental part of many retailer's omnichannel strategy, other industries are seeking for omnichannel stock visibility and order sourcing optimization across multiple sources, even across multiple back end solutions, as well.
OAA is based on SAP Customer Activity Repository (aka CAR). While SAP CAR is a great solution for store retailers, other non-retail companies are
hesitant to implement a dedicated retail SAP solution "just" for omnichannel stock visibility and order sourcing optimization (as well as retail-like promotion pricing, see
my other blog).
Industries like high-tech, wholesale, consumer industries, air travel, sports & entertainment, postal, banking, insurance, public sector, etc. ... nowadays sell "products" to end consumers. So across these industries "Retail" has become a
function to address their digitalized customers.
Long words short: A solution was needed to offer an OAA-like set of capabilities for both Retail and non-Retail companies, independent from SAP CAR, SAP Retail solutiions and best even from any SAP solution set. Best in an even bigger context.
SAP Customer Order Sourcing is a public cloud service based on the SAP Cloud Platform and offers
- Calculation of (omnichannel) product availability
- across DC's, vendors, 3rd party warehouses and even stores
- You can use APIs to upload availability raw data. Based on this data and on temporary reservations, the system calculates which products are available to sell and in what quantity across all source types such as stores or distribution centers.
- Management of sources and source lists
- You can use APIs to upload, retrieve, and delete sources and their master data, and group sources in source lists. Sources and source lists are used for modeling sourcing strategies. You can also create source lists in the Strategy Builder app.
- Creation and maintenance of sourcing strategies
- Calculation of optimal sourcing results
- You can use APIs to calculate a sourcing result for one or multiple products with specific identifiers. When it calculates the sourcing result, the system runs through the assigned sourcing strategy.
- Management of temporary reservations
- You can use APIs to create, retrieve, update, and delete temporary reservations used to reserve products for a customer who is in the checkout process to buy the products. These reservations prevent the same product from being promised to different customers.
SAP Customer Order Sourcing is
independent from any back end or SAP industry solution, but of course pre-integrated with SAP S/4HANA (SAP ERP in progress) to retrieve the available-to-sell stock inventory of DC's.
P.S. SAP Customer Order Sourcing uses the identical data model
for stock availability to sell as the successful on-prem solution "Omnichannel Article Availability and Sourcing" (OAA). This makes it simple for OAA customers to switch to the cloud.
SAP Customer Order Sourcing comes with a subscription pricing model based on the number of API calls. See
here for details.
More information:
Enjoy,
Ingo
Dr. Ingo Woesner
Director, Outbound Product Management, SAP C/4HANA Suite
SAP SE
www.sap.com
Follow me on
ingo.woesner/content and
LinkedIn
