Smarter Delivery

What is smarter delivery?
It’s about keeping your promises, even when things go wrong.

Have you ever placed an order and wondered if it was going to arrive on time?
Perhaps you ordered it last minute?
Or maybe with enough time for standard shipping, but not a delay?
Have you ever been disappointed?

If so, you’re not alone.

There are many times when a late delivery will really hurt your relationship with your customer: A last minute gift, an outfit for a special event, equipment for a summer beach or camping trip, back to school supplies… the list goes on.

Luckily, most orders are delivered on time. But when they’re not, it’s a big problem.

An IBM study of 1,500 U.S. consumers found that 87.9% consider on-time, accurate delivery to be important when choosing where to shop. But delays happen. Sometimes due to manual processes or lack of inventory visibility, sometimes due to circumstances beyond your control.

Are there ways to minimize the impact of these delays, or prevent them altogether? Let’s look at three scenarios…

1. The Weather Event
One of your warehouse managers calls. A blizzard is inbound. A State of Emergency has been declared and no orders can ship after 4pm. What do you do?

You call IT. Tell them to take the node offline temporarily. Instantly, the system looks at which other warehouses have the inventory in-stock, and begins to route all future orders to alternates nodes. All future ‘promise dates’ are updated.

Meanwhile, the warehouse manager has his team review their queue of orders to make sure they can get them all out. If not, they submit those orders back to their order management system (OMS) for re-sourcing. They are then automatically routed to an alternate node too.

Once the weather event is over, you call IT and have them put the node back online. It’s that easy.

2. Smashed Inventory
The last one breaks. It lies in 1000 tiny pieces on the floor.

One of your warehouse managers (or store managers) logs into your system, and pushes the order back for rerouting. The OMS re-routes the order to your Florida DC (or another store) and automatically sends an updated shipment notification to your customer.

The best part. You’d didn’t even know.

3. Out of Stock – Online Order
Customer A orders an item online and she wants it the next day. Just one problem. The last one you had on-hand was just allocated to Customer B. Why didn’t your online store show that it was out of stock? Because it didn’t have to.

When your system can see inbound in-transit inventory, you have more available to promise. It turns out, Customer B opted for 5-7 day shipping. And your inbound inventory is due to arrive tomorrow from a highly reliable supplier – in plenty of time to fulfill Customer B’s order. So your system automatically adjusted the inventory allocation. Customer A gets the on-hand inventory, and both customers are happy.

Can your system do that?

Are you struggling with inventory visibility because:

Your order management system can only support one warehouse?
You don’t have an order management system?
Your ERP and WMS systems aren’t well integrated?
Your ERP system can’t support sophisticated allocation and other fulfillment business rules?
You can’t allocate in-transit inventory?

We can help. If you’re going to the Omnichannel Fulfillment and Logistics Forum 2016, contact Nicola Kinsella at nicola.kinsella@bridgesgi.com or 201-406-7713 to schedule an appointment.