IHL Insight The Order Management Market 2021
IHL Insight The Order Management Market 2021
IHL has been advising the retail community (vendors and retailers alike) since 1996 in retail information technology
evolution and strategy. Initially our focus was on point of sale software, hardware and in-store technology. But over
the years our focus has grown to cover all of retail information technology including commerce solutions, ERP,
merchandising/supply chain, sales and marketing, and business intelligence.
Over the years we’ve amassed a tremendous amount of primary- and secondary-source data through first-hand
consulting experience in this pursuit. From this ever-growing knowledge base of offerings like our Sophia Data
Service, the Worldview IT Sizing Forecast Model and custom research projects, insight has been gained at a level
unparalleled in the industry.
The IHL Insight Market View series of research studies build upon this knowledge and adds analyst insight to
graphically display vendor positioning, drive for innovation and projected growth.
The goal of this report, as well as the entire IHL Retail Executive Advisory Program (REAP), is to provide the retail
community with the most detailed and complete picture possible of the retail technology landscape. We do this to
assist retailers in vendor selection and to help the industry understand the trends, drivers and barriers that are
fundamentally transforming our industry. It is our intent that this body of research continue to grow in depth and
influence over the coming years. Undoubtedly, changes will be made and vendor positions will change. Some vendors
will bring innovative solutions to the industry that will see their clients flourish and experience new heights of their own
success. Their positions on the various IHL Insight Market View charts will improve. Likewise, others, maybe many
others, will miss the transformation happening all around them and stumble and fall. Their newfound position in the
industry will also be documented on the charts.
Retailers are encouraged to use these charts in discussions with their vendor partners. It is our intent that they provide
unique insights into vendor strategy and provide thought-provoking questions as we all move forward and prosper in
the Era of Intentional Innovation.
The foundation for a successful Unified Commerce strategy for a retail enterprise is a highly capable and configurable order
management system (OMS). Such a system is able to look at an order independently of the channel from which it originated. OMS is
both foundational and linked with the five key technology families, namely:
➢ Store Systems
➢ E-Commerce
➢ Business Intelligence (BI) / Analytics
➢ Merchandising / Supply Chain Management (SCM)
➢ Sales & Marketing
OMS is the natural extension of key POS functionality such as inventory visibility (across the enterprise), ordering from other stores,
return of online purchases, ship from store, order online from the POS, click and collect, and store-to-store transfer. The broad
functionality required by OMS is extended even further when one considers the additional permutations for ordering and return
brought by online and phone / catalog sales.
Here, Unified Commerce, with a foundation built upon OMS, acts as an architectural construct to overcome the constraints caused by
channel evolution. The payoff is tremendous and given the very thin IT budgets retailers work with, expect this transition to be much
slower than anyone wants, especially the vendor community.
The last 18 months, more than any in the history of OMS, has highlighted the need for broad and robust OMS functionality. For quite
a few retailers, OMS was and will continue to be the lifeline between business success or failure.
For retailers reviewing this report, most of the charts and tables are meant to highlight specific components of functionality
that we deem to be critical in our review of the competitive landscape. Should you have additional questions, we’re quite
happy to schedule a call to review any aspect of the report, the process, or further vendor observations beyond what is
summarized here that you’d like to understand further.
The market share and vendor positioning analysis uses over 1,400 known installs, meaning instances where we know
Vendor A’s is supplying OMS software to Retailer B. This yields a statistically significant view of the overall OMS market.
While we may not know the answer, we’re happy to find it out for you or provide you a list of similar competitors which may
have like functionality requirements and who they are using for OMS.
In this report we have taken a different approach than in the past. The evaluation and review process was extensive, and
we’d like to sincerely thank the vendors who were able to participate as it was an extensive time and resource commitment.
Using our database of installs we identified the 22 most prominent vendors supporting the General Retail and FDCM
marketplace. Of that group of vendors, 18 agreed to participate. That consisted of responding to a 51-question deep dive
survey, a vendor/solution briefing at their discretion, and lots of back and forth to clarify and fact check the final report. We
have included every vendor that responded in the analysis. There was only one vendor who we deemed in the top 15 that
declined participation, though we have still included them in the rankings. The goal of this research is to fully capture the
complete OMS market, by broadening our scope allows a more complete picture of the landscape for end users.
On the market value bar charts, we only include regional charts for NA and EMEA, along with worldwide. These two regions
represent over two-thirds of the WW OMS market. Their overarching share is why we’ve included those breakouts.
When reviewing our market size projection charts and vendor estimates these include on-premise software, SaaS, and on-
premise SW maintenance only relative to the B2C market. We do not include any systems integration (SI) revenue. It is just
too complex to estimate with a high degree of accuracy. Factors such as labor rates, customization, percentage internal
versus partners and customer complexity vary wildly so we stay away from the integrative services piece when sizing the
market value. Clients may feel free to schedule a call with us and we can provide market guidance relative to recommended
SI factors for calculating TAM (total addressable market) sizing.
➢ Economic Recovery
➢ Inventory Distortion, a $1T Problem
o The biggest barrier to retailer adoption and deployment is the o Inventory Distortion (out-of-stocks + overstocks)
overall economic recovery of the regions in which they represents a serious inefficiency within retail. Not only
operate. IMF 2021 GDP growth forecasts for NA (6.9%), do the overstocks tie up capital unnecessarily (and
EMEA (4.6%), APAC (7.5%) and LATAM (5.8%) are all result in discounting), but the out-of-stocks represent
encouraging, though there remain individual countries who sales that are lost to the competition. Both impact the
bottomline, as well as customer perception and ability to
will continue to struggle. respond to challenges.
o E-Commerce sales continue at levels higher than pre-COVID.
o The greatest barrier to these markets is recovery of sales and ➢ Clean Data, and Lots of It
o The way forward for successful retailers is to use AI /
opening of stores. For the most part, retail sales have
ML on store operational issues. Trends and patterns
recovered nicely in 2021, and at an enterprise level, North that can be acted upon are more quickly discerned by AI
America shows a net of 4,300+ store openings for 2021. / ML than by humans. But this requires that retailers
have access to data from sources both inside and
➢ Inflation Risk outside the enterprise. The key aspect of this is the
o Central banks flooded markets with cash, with the need for data that is clean; if the retailer fails in this,
then the investment in AI / ML will simply enable them to
foreseeable result being marked inflation in every region.
make bad decisions more quickly.
This will serve as a brake on the economies of the individual
countries with slow recovery. ➢ Chip Shortage
o COVID caused the widespread shutdown of many
➢ GDPR and Other Data Protections factories, including those that manufacture
semiconductors (chips). These chips are found in all
o Merging customer data and item/order data requires retailers
manner of retail hardware devices like servers, mobile
to go the extra mile to ensure the data complies with data devices and scanners. Aggressive expectations are for
protection standards. This can slow the vendor selection and the shortage to be relieved sometime around the end of
deployment process. Retailers would be wise to consider 2021, but IHL believes the backlog really won’t
these issues in any software installation. disappear until mid/end of 2022.
Over 75% of the ratings and positioning come from completely objective measures leveraging our WorldView IT Sizing and
Forecasting model and our Sophia data service which tracks installs by vendor. Only 25% of the total positioning is in any
softer measure such as review of innovation or customer satisfaction.
Over the next 11 pages we highlight some of the key comparative metrics between vendors. These are meant to highlight
some of the key differentiators among vendors. These can be used as pre-screening metrics, or the basis for further
questions.
Cegid ✓ ✓ ✓ Partial
enVista ✓ ✓ Complete
Fujitsu ✓ Complete
IBM ✓ ✓ ✓ Complete
Manhattan Complete
NewStore ✓ Complete
OneStock ✓ Complete
Oracle ✓ ✓ Partial
Orckestra ✓
Radial ✓ ✓ Complete
Salesforce ✓ Partial
Softeon ✓ ✓ ✓ Partial
Tecsys ✓
Cegid ✓
enVista ✓ ✓
Fluent Commerce ✓
Fujitsu Salesforce
IBM IBM
Kibo Commerce ✓
Manhattan ✓
NewStore ✓
OneStock OVH
OneView Commerce ✓ ✓ ✓
Oracle Oracle
Orckestra ✓
Salesforce ✓ Salesforce
Softeon ✓ ✓ ✓ Oracle
Tecsys ✓
The reality is that there are several hundreds/thousands of features and functions that drive an OMS selection. A vendor’s
value proposition is much more detailed than can be captured in a few bulleted items, but with that noted, the observations
that follow note the responses and areas that really were unique in their responses. These comments are drawn from
general understanding, the interview/briefing process as well as the 51-question survey each vendor filled out.
We have only included summary profiles on those vendors that responded to the questionnaire.
Should you have questions on any vendors, our observations or any metrics, please feel free to reach out.
The IHL Insight Market View series is part of the IHL Retail Executive Advisory Program. This is the first of
several research studies to be released and it is only available as part of an advisory relationship. The IHL
Insight Market View research studies combine several of IHL’s best-in-class research components into a
single industry view meant for retailer and vendor executives.
Step 1 – We leverage our WorldView IT Sizing Forecast Model, a sizing and forecast tool for over 300
retail Hardware, Software, SaaS and Services categories. IHL has been sizing and forecasting the
retail/hospitality market worldwide by solutions for over 10 years. This provides the upper bounds of the
market data and total market size.
Step 2 – We combine this with our Sophia Data Service that tracks over 4,500 enterprise retailers and
hospitality providers (with a minimum of 50 locations) in terms of which vendor’s technology a given
retailer/hospitality provider has installed, the total lanes/licenses, the timing of those installations and when
they are due to be replaced.
Step 3 – We validate the installs and business sizing for each vendor through public records and
vendor/channel interviews. Customer service/traction is validated through existing customer interviews and
surveys.
Step 4 – We merge all of this together into a singular view that not only provides total market size, but also
market share and scale of difference between vendors.
This study represents the overall worldwide retail and hospitality Software and Software-as-a-Service
market. For more information on the additional studies being released as part of the Retail Executive
Advisory Program, please see our website or contact us at +1.615.591.2955.