Everything starts with the order: as customer demands for responsiveness increase, supply chains strain to synchronize orders across multiple channels

When Lamps Plus expanded its business onto the Web four years ago, the company's order volume grew along with revenues. With combined inventory for store and Internet business, the 1,500-employee specialty lamp merchant had to incorporate and manage order activity from its Internet site and more than 40 retail stores.

"Suddenly, we were big into the Internet business," says Bill Gratke, planning and supply chain management director with Lamps Plus in Chatsworth, Calif. "Now that we're competing with the big boys, we had to figure out how to ship quicker and integrate [Web and retail] ordering."

Lucent Technologies in Murray Hill, N.J., is one of the big boys, but the $8.5 billion communications and networking technologies corporation faced similar customer-fulfillment issues. The company needed to synchronize a complex, six-continent network of disparate enterprise business systems and supply chains with an order management solution that would help it slash $8 billion in inventory while boosting order fulfillment accuracy.

Despite that need, synchronized order management remains a thorny challenge for supply chain managers. They must maintain consistent order management processes throughout disparate internal and external systems and channels. Business partners' remote and dissimilar structures are also crucial pieces of the puzzle Supporting multiple channels offers companies a slew of benefits, but managing orders across untethered systems and processes is hardly simple, especially as customers increase their demands for enhanced responsiveness. The Web has also added a layer of complexity.

Successful companies must let customers order products anywhere they sell them and "fulfill orders as promised from anywhere," says a recent white paper titled Satisfying Customer Expectations: Succeeding in the Multi-Channel Retail World from Yantra Corp., a fulfillment software vendor in Tewksbury, Mass.

Yantra's report notes that companies' channels frequently offer diverse prices, inventory, promotions, and policies. Customers, however, demand the ability to order products online and return them to stores or to browse in stores and buy online.

Gratke, with Lamps Plus, is well aware of his firm's need for an orchestrated order management approach. The company fulfills orders through stores, the Web, and in-store kiosks, all of which link to the firm's Order Fulfillment software from Escalate Inc. Order Fulfillment automates the company's direct-to-customer fulfillment process for all e-commerce orders, which now represent 10% of total business, says Gratke.

Escalate's software augments the retailer's legacy inventory management system, which can't process direct-to-customer orders. Order Fulfillment, which Escalate hosts on an Oracle Corp. database, plugs into the existing Lamps Plus inventory system. It also integrates with major parcel carriers, a feature that provides delivery options to Lamps Plus customers.

The integrated approach to order management is critical for Gratke's firm, which expects to triple its volume of online orders. Lamps Plus recently began selling products and taking orders via Amazon Marketplace. Amazon.com's marketplace lets third parties hawk items on its Web site. That business and new e-commerce sites to serve builders, architects, and interior designers should boost Web orders dramatically, says Gratke.

Order Fulfillment manages all Lamps Plus e-commerce orders for packing, labeling, shipping, and shipment tracking. The company aims eventually to process all shipments from store, catalog, and e-commerce channels through a centralized order management process.