Order Routing: How to optimize fulfillment—without writing code

With fabric OMS, any retail operator can configure order routing rules to reduce order errors, get closer to customers, and reduce shipping expenses.

As businesses grow, so does the complexity of allocating resources to fulfill customer orders across multiple locations. While introducing more fulfillment centers can increase your capacity and get you closer to customers, it can also become a logistical challenge that can negatively impact operations.

For example, today’s retailers need to:

• Get real-time inventory snapshots of what stock they have across their network at any given time.
• Prioritize orders by urgency, customer importance, or other business rules.
• Determine which are the best locations to ship orders from.
• Coordinate with other systems to ensure a seamless flow of information and execution.
• Calculate the distance, time, and cost to deliver orders, all in an instant.

When confronted with a myriad of orders flooding your store, it becomes increasingly more difficult to manage inventory, order, and fulfillment processes across multiple sales channels and fulfillment locations.

To get products to shoppers fast, enterprise retailers require a decision engine that can seamlessly allocate inventory and fulfill customer orders. A powerful order management system (OMS) that features order fulfillment logic (OFL) can seamlessly route orders to the best locations to fulfill orders from.

What is OFL?

OFL refers to logic-based rules that make decisions about where a company routes its orders for optimized fulfillment. In fabric OMS, this order fulfillment feature allows a business to create fulfillment rule sets that direct orders to different fulfillment locations based on characteristics, such as geo-location, warehouse location, item price, order attribute type, and more.

Development vs. no-code configuration for OFL

In commerce, the choice between configuration and development for OFL often depends on an organization’s resources, money, time, and expertise. Configuration is only as good as the use cases it addresses. For example, Shopify’s smart order routing service only supports 4 main rules out of the box. Today, it is not enough to simply grant non-technical users the ability to configure OFL without writing code. Enterprise businesses need to get products into the hands of customers quickly and cost-effectively. A highly-configurable solution that supports a variety of different use cases can help lower costs and deliver on speed, efficiency, accessibility, and adaptability.

fabric OMS supports more OFL use cases than other solutions

fabric OMS allows more configuration of order routing rules and supports more use cases through OFL than other fulfillment solutions in the market. Once an order is created, fabric’s allocation module and OFL will automatically route the order to the optimal location based on the parameters and rules set by the retailer. As a high-performance OMS, some of the OFL use cases include:

Routing orders to optimal locations for omnichannel fulfillment

Routing orders to the best locations for buy online, pickup in store (BOPIS) enhances customer convenience by directing orders based on the chosen delivery method.

Setting up geographic bands to select the location nearest to the customer

To improve speed and efficiency, retailers need to ensure that products are sourced from the closest inventory point. This helps minimize shipping distances, reduce delivery times, and improve customer satisfaction through fast and localized delivery.

Configuring automatic reallocation for no-inventory situations

This ensures that orders are automatically reallocated when inventory shortages occur, allowing businesses to fulfill on time and maintain transparency with customers.

Configuring split shipment rules

fabric OMS offers flexibility in configuring split shipment rules, allowing retailers to define their preferences more precisely.

Using order and product metadata to set rules

Retailers can tailor their fulfillment processes based on specific characteristics found in order and product attributes. This allows for a more targeted and responsive strategy to order processing.

The industry’s first commerce platform with native OMS to optimize the post-purchase experience

With fabric OMS, today’s omnichannel retailers gain advanced no-code order routing capabilities to simplify the order fulfillment process across multiple channels. The benefits are clear: with a streamlined and highly customizable approach to order management, retailers can get products to customers faster, thereby improving operations, enhancing customer satisfaction, and ultimately driving more profitable operations.

If you’re interested in learning more about fabric OMS and see how our no-code OFL rules engine works, feel free to schedule a demo with us.