Order Management System: Compass 2.0

The problem

Six legacy order management stacks, about ten years old and patched market by market, served eight markets. Dealers found product search slow, product status opaque, multi-warehouse sourcing manual and order editing so disruptive that they often cancelled and re-entered orders.

What needed to be done

Get 20+ stakeholders (dealers, distributors, sales, business, analysts and Salesforce developers) to agree on one Salesforce-based order management system, without erasing real local market requirements.

How the right problem was found

I audited five representative orders per market with the local teams. About 80% of the "local needs" turned out to be differences in vocabulary and about 20% were real divergence, mostly around tax, customer rights and fulfilment contracts. That told me the real problem was a lack of shared concepts, not six genuinely different businesses. A shared glossary let people discuss the same things, and workshops with ranked pre-work and a decision log recorded the rationale and any dissent. The design that came out has four layers: a shared order core, pluggable country extensions, a consistent UI shell and designed slots for market-specific content.

The outcome, measured

One system replaced six, with local behaviour kept where it genuinely mattered. Four design contracts answered the dealers' chronic complaints: findability, status at the moment of decision, multi-centre sourcing and order editing as a first-class action.

20+

Stakeholders aligned

6 → 1

Legacy stacks

8 of 14

Markets onboarded within months

240+

Decisions logged with rationale

Skills and tools