An OMS sits between the places orders come from, such as an ecommerce site, marketplaces, stores or a wholesale portal, and the systems that fulfill and account for them, such as the warehouse and the ERP. It decides where each order ships from and keeps its status current for the customer and the service team.
Many smaller businesses run order management inside their ecommerce platform or ERP rather than a separate product. Either way, the OMS is where most order exceptions surface first, which makes it the natural place for automation to read an order’s history and route a problem to the person who owns it.