Map out requirements before choosing a vendor

Wilson pointed out that there's potential for redundancy in order management if the same data is being captured by and shuttled between multiple systems. "That's not the goal in business these days," he said. "You want to streamline those processes and avoid as much work as possible."

So, before setting out to purchase an order management system, business leaders should first figure out what they want and need.

Wilson recommended starting by physically writing out existing order management processes. "If you're looking at your order management, what does that look like on paper? What are your business requirements around that? Ask yourself those questions and physically map it out," he said.

He also stressed the importance of planning for future requirements. "You don't want to select a system based on what you do now. You want to define what you want to look like in the future and integrate those requirements into your selection process." And it's the people actually working in the system on a daily basis -- in addition to department heads -- who should be involved with defining these requirements, he said.

"They're the people who know what's going on day-to-day," Wilson said. "It's a collaborative effort. You want the people who are doing the job as well as management who have that vision into the future of the company."

When Mike Zhang went looking for an order management system, he had to ensure that it was compatible with his company's shopping cart system.

"In terms of buying best practices, it's [a] hybrid approach for e-commerce," said Zhang, president and chief operating officer at Airsoft Megastore in Irwindale, Calif., a Web-only retailer of recreational pellet guns, gear and accessories. "It's the traditional concept of spec'ing out everything you need from the software and providing that deliverables list to all the vendors."

At his company, Zhang is responsible for making the decisions about what technology to buy. However, he solicited others' opinions in the vetting process, and factored them into his ultimate decision.

"I evaluated business processes to determine what we needed to do on a day-to-day basis, and then I outlined how order management software would be able to help us work more efficiently and more inexpensively," he said. "We also had certain executives in the company involved -- but I wouldn't say to a great extent. Everybody laid out what they wanted in a solution, and we pieced that together and I was the person to carry that project forward."

Airsoft was mainly interested in reliability and uptime, as well as the sturdiness of the infrastructure because the company was looking at hosted systems, Zhang said.

"We were also concerned about how the software facilitated process," he said. "We didn't want to be in a position where we were conforming our company's procedures and sacrificing efficiency in order to satisfy software logic -- how the software was designed to work. Ideally we wanted the software to be designed around how we work." He added that price was another consideration.

Companies should also be looking for distributed order management systems instead of the classic order management, said Gene Alvarez, vice president and analyst at Gartner Inc. in Stamford, Conn.