What are the most effective order fulfillment strategies for high-volume periods?

workflows & pipelines are key to automating all but the exception management within order orchestration stages. It's important to design an exception/alerting framework that considers work queues based on priorities and specifically flows that track against expected delivery dates.

Optimizing inventory is hard for high volume events. Some of the key strategies that I have seen are - 1. Centralize and scale up digital order fulfillment from warehouses/FC, leaving stores' capacity and inventory to serve store level demand. This would require inventory planning months ahead to divert inventory to right locations. 2. It is okay to have slightly longer fulfillment time during such rush period as long as expectations are set at the time of ordering. Assess promise functions daily (or more frequently) as inventory position and capacity will remain volatile during high volume periods. 3. Utilize store backroom and last mile delivery partners to fulfill digital orders from larger stores in locations distant from warehouses.

Especially for retailers, it's important to understand and design an inventory-protection strategy to ensure foot traffic is still serviced with store inventory while potentially skewing the fulfillment to locations/nodes that have robotics or pick/pack automation.

One key consideration is to leverage cloud computing technologies to develop inventory management flow plans at the SKU or item level as opposed to traditional class levels. This forces rigour into the planning process to ensure there is a managed path over the life of the item from introduction, replenishment and disposition. Managing inventory at the class level leads to waste as current demand is more volatile and has to be understood at a more micro level.

The ability to leverage available inventory from many locations or channels, but not exponentially increase shipping costs is a delicate balance. A sophisticated DOM/OMS is the only way to keep inventory controlled & minimize the impact to your margin. Your DOM/OMS needs to be flexible so that routing rules can be changed as demand shifts. If the foot traffic is too high in a certain store, you must be able to turn-off or divert to a different channel, & agile enough to turn it back on as the store traffic subsides. Leveraging dark-stores in addition to warehouses can take some burden off stores during peak times and provide inventory at potentially lower delivery cost to any fulfillment channel or DTC, and is transparent to your customer.

OMS is the key here, and no other solution does as adequate of a job in ensuring multi-channel order management than an OMS. Invest well ahead of time and ensure your flows are smooth for the peak season.

Some thoughts on using stores for fulfillment during peak days - Start with reviewing store capacity and fulfillment calendars - Implement separate capacities for Shipping and BOPIS. - Use store capacity for quick-pick (single line, single unit) shipping orders during peak. This improves the pick efficiency while reducing the fulfillment delays. - Provide longer customer pick up window for BOPIS orders - Prioritize store fulfillment from back-room over picking from sales floor. This ensures picking supported by inventory accuracy - Implement automated routing of store orders to other store or DC in case of exceptions - Implement an interactive control tower solution to monitor and control fulfillment parameters and business configurations

Within a Fulfillment Network, utilize OMS solutions to distribute unplanned demand across multiple fulfillment nodes. Within a Fulfillment Facility, continuously optimize your Demand Plan, Labor Plan, and Financial Plan to spread shipments beyond typical SLAs. Always ensure that shipping times are assessed daily and communicated accurately. Brands may also offer customer incentives for delayed deliveries if they can avoid unplanned Labor or Shipping costs.

* Keep the monitoring on your store capacity. * Have strategy when capacity is exhausted, either to increase, turn-off Or divert the orders to an another store. * Each options comes with caveat. Increasing the capacity needs alignment with the Store team so that they can fulfill the promise. Turning-off large number of stores may divert the orders to the other side of the coast and may increase shipping cost / delivery timelines. * Also an analysis of pre-peak volumes to stores will give an idea of routing/profiling of customer base. This will help in planning more Store resources, capacity for peak and the inventory stocking needs.

Very important. Setup your dashboard to monitor DC performance on metrics that are important for meeting customer promises. All items are not equal. Ensure your dashboard and metrics can identify receiving, optimal storage and outbound processing on the key inventory items that are in demand by your customers are any given time. In addition to overall performance across all items. In today's world all businesses have several supply chains being managed simulateously

Also, consider resetting your performance standards to your external consumers. If you're going to take a week to ship something at a high volume time then reset those expectations on your website

Consider promotional strategies to drive volume into stores to take processing load off of the fulfillment centers at peak times.

If you can manage your demand, try to spread the demand to match your supply and processing capacity. It will save you quite a bit of money and boost your resource utilization. If you can’t manage your demand load balance your demand across your fulfillment network be it stores, 3PL, temp fulfillment centers etc. You should also demand balance capacity to process. Lastly you can boost processing capacity using optimization techniques and robotic automation. These are a bit long term initiatives and come with additional capital costs but the benefits can be great. If you can tap into the on-demand capacity networks to process orders, handle logistics and last mile deliveries.