Integrated Fulfillment: The Direct/Retail Balancing Act

Systems that do this are either batch- or online-integrated to the retailer’s merchandising systems. Plus, they place affordable systems in stores for order fulfillment. Here are a few examples of retailers that have implemented somewhat different solutions from two vendors.

• Title Nine Sports uses MICROS-Retail’s cross-channel inventory broker, Locate. Each company can identify inventory in alternative channels and have those items reserved against demand. Those orders are shipped to the customer’s home, office or gift recipient, or set aside at the appropriate retail location for store pickup.
  Locate’s Order Broker module has system-controlled business rules that determine where a product can be picked and shipped from. Prior to Order Broker, a user had to manage all the decisions. Order Broker has decision rules for checking to see whether there’s a purchase order that’ll come in within days, which location has the most inventory and which stores aren’t available for picking, such as a new store.
• Jones Apparel Group, a conglomerate that operates the 800-store women’s apparel and shoe chains Jones New York, Nine West, Anne
  Klein, Bandolino and Easy Spirit, has successfully installed VendorNet’s StoreNet system. In developing StoreNet, Sharon Gardner, founder and president of Delray Beach, Fla.-based VendorNet, applied the concepts in her firm’s vendor drop-ship software to fulfillment of direct orders from stores.
  Jones Apparel has thrived using the system to maximize e-commerce sales through store fulfillment, without adverse effects on store operations and inventory.
• CompUSA is also live with StoreNet. Initially in two pilot stores, it will have 50 stores on the system when complete.
  The StoreNet order fulfillment process allocates orders and publishes them to stores based on user-defined rules such as inventory availability, safety stock levels, proximity to the customer and store preference setting.
  At the store, a salesperson prints pick tickets for all the allocated orders.
  Inventory is picked from the store and staged for packing and shipment. Picked inventory quantities are confirmed in StoreNet, which produces packing slips and shipping labels for confirmed items. When a carrier picks up the package, a ship confirmation triggers an update to the order management system for billing to the customer.
• JoS. A. Bank Clothiers, with more than 450 men’s apparel stores nationwide, was an early adopter of cross-channel order processing from MICROS-Retail, a unit of MICROS Systems. Store associates have access to the inventory positions of other retail locations via MICROS-Retail’s Tradewind Retail POS, or to its direct commerce operation using MICROS-Retail’s CWDirect order management system. Store associates can place an order against direct commerce inventory, and that order will seamlessly flow through the fulfillment process as if the order came directly from the customer.

Complex Business Rules
At the heart of store fulfillment systems like these are user-controlled sets of complex business rules that take into account saleable inventory quantities, safety stocks, overstocks, newly allocated orders, split shipment rules, proximity to the customer and more.