Checklist: What to Look for in an OMS

A guide to selecting the right system to support Ad Ops and increase profitability 

An Order Management System (OMS) provides a vital path to streamlined inventory management, ensuring timely delivery of products and establishing processes that improve efficiency for everyone—from Ad Ops teams to clients. An effective OMS can also free up time for a high-value strategy and a better customer experience, two often neglected aspects of business that improve cash flow and profitability. 

What should a media company look for when shopping for an OMS to take operations to a new level? The options—and considerations—are many, so we’ve consolidated them into a checklist to help you move quickly from evaluation to integration. We’ve organized these considerations into seven categories: 

1. Onboarding 
2. Campaigns
3. Billing and invoicing 
4. Contract management
5. Integrations
6. Products
7. Reporting 

Onboarding 

Technology is necessary for survival in our industry, but integrating new systems is often dreaded, difficult, and time-consuming. The right OMS solution should make life easier—no steep learning curves are required. This means an OMS must have advanced user experience testing, an intuitive interface, and customer service teams to guide users and adapt systems as needed. As you shop for the right fit, consider the following: 

• Does the OMS integrate easily with your CRM? 
• Is the user interface intuitive and easy to use? 
• Was the system designed for media businesses?
• How easily configurable is it? 
• Can it be used out of the box, or is a timely set-up required? 
• What kind of customer support is available? 
• Does the system require extensive coding? 
• What is the solution’s adoption and team adherence rate?

Campaigns

The right OMS smooths sales and delivery processes with easy source codes, quick campaign, and price list creation, easy management of segments and promotions, and at-a-glance status updates on performance and inventory levels. With timely and easy-to-access data, Ad Ops teams can quickly resolve technical issues and ensure delivery. Facilitating the management of all campaign details is a key aspect of any OMS. Consider the following when shopping for yours: 

• Can you define triggers for inventory checks, rate checks, and more? 
• Are there easy-to-create production lead time rules? 
• Can you export plans with a click? 
• Can you create tracking workflows? 
• Does it offer the ability to adhere to periodic delivery goals? 
• Can you differentiate between campaign types?
• Can you apply dynamic rules that trigger approval? 
• Is it easy to configure agency discounts or commission percentages?
• Can you flight line items in order to allocate percentages evenly, per weekly budgets or by impressions given by the agency? 
• Can you reassign orders individually and in bulk? 
• Can you designate a business vertical for every order?

Billing and invoicing 

The right OMS makes it easier to process inventory and sales data with automated invoicing, purchase orders, and accounts payable and receivable. With a clear line of sight into the numbers, understanding profitability and margins becomes a snap. Ad Ops teams are then able to enhance processing, improve cash flow, and free up time for more important tasks. When eyeing your billing and invoicing options, consider the following to get peak performance: 

• Can you define custom rules? 
• Can you set multiple rate cards and currencies with automatic conversions? 
• Is it possible to adjust line items directly? 
• Can you pull in billing contacts from the CRM, or do you need an API? 
• Are custom billing schedules easy to create? 
• Is monthly auditing easy and comprehensive? 
• Can you retroactively make billing statements? 
• Can invoices be capped in case of over-delivery? 

Contract management

Maximizing financial returns and minimizing risk are at the heart of contract management. Defining terms and conditions, ensuring compliance, and providing documentation put everyone on the same page so no contractual obligations are overlooked. Avoiding these inaccuracies can have a big impact. In fact, poor contract management costs companies as much as 9% of their bottom line, according to World Commerce & Contracting. To protect your profits, take into consideration the following: 

• Can you import and export multiple Excel templates? 
• Can a single proposal capture multiple spending levels? 
• Can reports be generated automatically? 
• Can you track proposal initiation dates? 
• Is it possible to identify “value-add” or “make-good” with reason codes on an order line? 
• Can you flag outstanding deals by date range and marketplace? 
• Can you set flights to hard vs. soft weekly goals? 
• Does the platform easily provide visibility of errors or rejection notices to track and manage planner performance?
• Will you track changes to a proposal with a timestamp by default?

Integrations

In a modern publishing environment, connected systems are a must. When every system communicates, every team does, too. Syncing inventory, routing, invoicing, delivery, and more integrations lead to smoother operations and, in turn, better customer experience and retention. The result: bigger deal sizes, a hallmark of high-growth media businesses. Ensuring your OMS supports a high level of integration is vital to success. Ask the following: 

• Are the OMS and CRM built on a single platform or easily integrated? 
• Can you pull in accounts and contacts from the CRM easily? 
• Does the OMS integrate easily with your inventory management system? 
• Is media plan information automatically pushed to the ad server? 
• Can you send attachments via integration with new customers? 
• Can you send IO data in the format needed to ingest into the enterprise resource planning system? 
• Can you connect the ad server easily? 
• How is the data’s integrity ensured? 
• What kind of technical knowledge is required to connect systems? 
• Is customer service available to support integration? 

Products

The flexibility and targeting capabilities of digital products are part of what makes them so valuable to advertisers. As such, it is mission-critical to create and manage products that meet advertisers’ goals. Examine the following as you’re considering the product possibilities in an OMS: 

• Can you create category restrictions during product creation? 
• Is it possible to apply pre-defined targeting options to individual line items? 
• Can you make tax and reporting easier by assigning locality to flights so you know where impressions are being targeted and delivered? 
• If needed, can you create ad-hoc packages? 
• Can you enforce a single rate card per sales order? 
• Is it easy to define rates for packages? 
• How readily can you look up the total inventory of products and targets?

Reporting 

Improving Ad Ops and Sales processes, filling knowledge gaps, hitting quotas, and staying compliant is hard to do, but reporting offers a path to bring data-driven insights to the most crucial aspects of business. Improved team performance, faster decision-making, and greater customer retention are some of the benefits of robust reporting. Analyze the reporting features of your potential OMS with these guiding questions: 

• Can you run ad-hoc reports? 
• Can daily reports include impressions by product, campaign, or other metrics? 
• Are pacing reports accurate and easy to generate? 
• Can you report on any selectable field in the system as necessary? 
• Are sponsorship availability and bookings easily quantified? 
• Can you schedule automated reports in advance? 
• Can you email reports within the OMS? 
• Do users have the ability to build and save their own reports? 
• Is it possible to generate reports on the lifecycle and timing of orders? 
• Are year-over-year summaries produced easily? 
• Can you generate sales rep revenue performance reports to determine commissions?

Increase visibility—and decrease worry. 

Publishers must eliminate spreadsheets, siloed data, and busy work to succeed in an increasingly complex omnichannel media landscape. Given the elaborate product suites, management processes, and timing that Ad Ops teams encounter every day, arming them with tools that create clarity can be the difference between a banner year and a faltering top line. The right OMS offers visibility, drives insights, and, ultimately, creates profit.

Boostr was developed by former media executives for media businesses, making it the only OMS designed for media publishers' unique needs and concerns. Workflows, reporting, and more are all purpose-built for publishers, so you get everything you need in an intuitive system that can be used out of the box. 

Ready for game-changing order management? Let’s talk. Book. a personalized demo today!