Fluent Commerce OMS in a MACH Stack fora Flash-Sale Retailer

Context

From July 2022 to February 2023, before founding Doctor Project, I worked within an integrator team for a home-improvement flash-sale retailer. My role was Senior Business Analyst and Product Owner for the deployment of Fluent Commerce as order management system, in a MACH architecture, with four to six partners involved at the same time: development, UX, payment and logistics.

The challenge

In a composable stack, the OMS does not guess. Every rule has to be written: when a product counts as available, how an order moves through its life, which warehouse ships it, what happens when a payment is flagged, how a return comes back into stock. Leave one rule vague and each partner fills the gap in its own way.

What we did

• Owned and prioritized the product backlog, more than 100 user stories.
• Ran technical and functional workshops with the integration partners.
• Wrote the functional and technical specifications and the end-to-end process diagrams across e-commerce, payment, warehouse and CRM.
• Defined the business rules for product availability, order lifecycle, fulfillment, payment and fraud, returns and inventory.

A MACH architecture gives freedom, and freedom needs rules written down. That is true for orders, and it is just as true for product data. For the trade-offs of composable architectures, see MACH vs monolith.