Order routing is one of the important module of the ecommerce supply chain. Order Routing is basically a means to deliver the order to the customer as fast as possible in a cost effective way. An effective order routing is possible with a set of business rules. These rules can be tweaked as per the retailer’s requirement. Fenix has built its own order routing engine and is helping customers to route their orders across their multiple fulfillment centers.
Fenix supports some important allocation rules for optimized order routing. These rules can be prioritized and can be chosen which rule should be applied before another. A user friendly rules screen will help the business user to change the rules, prioritize and add/remove them with ease and any change that is made to the rules will effect immediately.
DC Priority Rule
This rule is for those retailers who ships multiple DCs and stores and want to prioritize the DCs before the stores. The reason why the retailers prefer shipping from stores may be due to multiple factors like below
DCs has more inventory
DCs has more service coverage to fulfill the orders
Inter-transfer of inventory can happen between the DCs which makes the DCs highly available
Sample Rule snapshot
Main DC rule
If there are multiple DCs available to ship an order, there is a provision to prioritize one DC over the other. The priority can be based on the proximity of the fulfillment location to the buyer or the available quantity in the location.
Example
Assume a SKU is present in both the store (ST1 and ST2) and a DC (WH1). Although the SKU is available in both Store and DC, this rule will make sure the routing is done from DC.
Sortation Rule
This rule will prioritizes the locations based on the distance of the fulfillment center to the buyer or the available quantity at the fulfillment center.
This rule is a generic rule that can be added as a nested rule under, let’s say, the DC Priority rule or can be added as a main rule itself. In the former case, only the DCs will be prioritized based on the criteria and in the latter case, rest of the stores will be prioritized.
Example
Assume a SKU is present in three fulfillment centers and the Sortation rule is set to sort by quantity. Since the fulfillment center has the max quantity, Fenix will route the order to it.
Split Shipments
A fast selling SKU may get the inventory deplete in all warehouses and such a situation may arise, the SKU’s request quantity may not be available in one single location. In such cases, enabling this rule will make sure the same SKU gets split into multiple locations for fulfillment.
However, the caveat is that this may increase the number of shipments. So, the retailers can add a max split criteria which restrict the number of fulfillments a SKU can be split into.
Example
The SKUs requested quantity of 10 is not available in any fulfillment location. So, this rule split the SKU into 3 separate fulfillment and still be able to fulfill the order.
Merge Shipments Rule
This rule when enabled will try to minimize the number of shipments for an order. The rule looks at the inventory position of all the SKUs in the cart and tries to pick a location which can fulfill the order as a whole.
Example
The below SKUs is present in two near fulfillment centers separately. However, in a farther warehouse, both the SKUs are present as a whole. So, Fenix will automatically prioritize the farther warehouse so that the entire order can be shipped from a single location.