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Since last more than a decade now, OFBiz has been helping us in building eCommerce stores and using its PIM + CMS + OMS + Fulfillment abilities for servicing online retail businesses. Time has changed, with the growing customer expectations new systems have emerged for serving different functions e.g. in any established brand there will be designated systems to do certain jobs such as PIM(Product Information Management), E-commerce, POS(Point of Sale), OMS(Order Management System), Customer Service, WMS(Warehouse Management System), ERP(Accounting System), etc. 

If it's a fresh start for a brand and no legacy systems are there, OFBiz as PIM, eCommerce(API mode), OMS, WMS can be the choice, which can surely serve the business and scale up when needed without any additional development or maintenance effort. Also, it's easily customizable as per specific requirements.

As mentioned earlier, at the next level, we find an established brand where the business is tied up to operate with legacy platforms. There are various reasons for this limitation of not being able to completely replace a stack of applications by OFBiz in one go. In this case, if the business considers OFBiz as OMS, then in most cases, the challenge is to efficiently and cost-effectively integrate with PIM + Sales Channels(eCommerce, POS, Marketplaces, Social Selling Platforms) + Legacy WMS + ERP systems. 

Below given is a list of expectations when OFBiz is to be used as an OMS in an ecosystem:

Here are the functional expectations:

  1. Real-time inventory visibility
  2. Order routing to the appropriate facility for fulfillment based on a defined strategy by the business
  3. Order splitting for faster fulfillment of available items on the order
  4. Fulfillment application to be used at Stores(BOSS - Buy Online Ship-to-Store)for picking, packing, and shipping Label 
  5. Store inventory management
  6. Ease of managing most popular customer journeys across the channels like BOPIS(Buy Online and Pick inStore), BORIS(Buy Online Return inStore), and Endless Aisle.
  7. Preorder and Backorder Management

Integration expectations:

  1. Cloud-based
  2. Security
  3. Scalable
  4. Easy to customize
  5. APIs availability(Headless) - Integration readiness 
  6. Data import and export functions(CSV)
  7. Middleware support for information exchange in different formats expected by source and the destination
  8. Cost-effective system deployment and maintenance 

Non-functional expectations:

  1. Trust from the global developer and user community  
  2. No vendor lockin, no licensing cost, no renewals
  3. No upfront heavy investment
  4. Skillful vast developer community with guidance from industry veterans

Most of the above-mentioned expectations are already fulfilled by OFBiz. An audit will help us identify a roadmap to work on. The latest example of this is one initiative in the community from Arpit Mor on this thread. The move where we are planning to build a plugin for "Headless Commerce" will help a lot in doing integrations efficiently and turn around time will be less.

One more good example where implementation is in-progress is "OFBiz - Shopify Integration" where OFBiz is serving as OMS. Here is the JIRA reference: OFBIZ-11679 






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