Order Fulfillment
Optimize E-Commerce Order Fulfillment with Automation
Drive operational efficiency and protect margins by injecting Intelligent Automation (IA) into the process.
Understand the gaps and bottlenecks in
end-to-end processes.
Connect data points between your company
and suppliers.
What is an Automated Order Fulfillment Solution?
Automation can alleviate pain points associated with order fulfillment. In fact, there are multiple areas where automation can be applied. Two main areas include connecting third-party logistics platforms with existing Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) and Operations Management and supporting owned-warehouse management.
In any scenario, you can capture insights from high volumes of disparate information and make proactive, data-driven decisions. Let’s look at a few automation scenarios.
Order Processing
E-commerce order processing can be time-consuming and error-prone. Intelligent Automation tools such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Process Mining (PM) can help automate this process by extracting data from different systems and verifying it, generating invoices, and updating the order status.
Inventory Management
Accurate inventory management is essential for efficient e-commerce order fulfillment. Intelligent Automation tools such as Machine Learning (ML) can help predict demand, optimize inventory levels, and automate stock replenishment.
Shipping and Delivery
E-commerce shipping and delivery involve coordinating with carriers, generating shipping labels, and tracking orders. Intelligent Automation tools such as RPA can help automate these tasks, reducing the time and effort required to fulfill orders.
Customer Service
Providing excellent customer service is critical for retaining e-commerce customers. Intelligent Automation tools such as Natural Language Processing can help automate customer service tasks such as answering FAQs, resolving complaints, and tracking shipments.
Solving the Pain Points of Order Fulfillment
The order fulfillment ecosystem continues to see incredible growth in e-commerce. There are more online shoppers than ever, with consumers preferring the convenience and speed of these transactions. More orders are great for business, but a high order volume also comes with challenges. Pain points run throughout these complex processes, impacting both consumers and businesses.
These are some of the most prominent order fulfillment challenges:
- Brands are under pressure to meet consumer demands while also dealing with rising costs, often setting up micro-warehouses for expanded geographical coverage.
- Businesses must compete with same-day delivery systems
- Inventory is in the wrong place to meet expected delivery targets.
- Disruption problems take time to predict and prevent.
- Responding to out-of-stock issues is slow, costing businesses sales.
- Data lives in many areas; aggregating and reconciling it is slow and manual.
- Forecasting future demand is murky without real-time, accurate data.
In the face of these challenges, the opportunity arises to optimize processes with Intelligent Automation.
Benefits of Automating Order Fulfillment
What can you gain from automated order fulfillment? Here’s a preview of how it can positively impact many different roles in a business.
Logistics Managers
- Gain greater visibility into inventory.
- Improve accuracy of third-party integrations.
- Reduce human error related to inventory accuracy and document processing.
Demand Planners
- Reconcile third-party system data from multiple sources, lessening the strain on workers’ time.
- Automate manual tasks to remove them from human queues so employees can focus on more meaningful work.
Supply Chain Planners and Category Managers
- Find potential out-of-stock issues quickly to facilitate faster restocks.
- Access real-time insights and tracking to catch discrepancies in counts faster and address them proactively.
Production Planners
- Spot possible disruption issues more efficiently to improve business continuity.
- Track data to drive more informed decision-making for future automations and improvements.
The Latest Posts on Order Fulfillment and Intelligent Automation
6 Real-World Use Cases for Automated Inventory Management
Many factors determine inventory accuracy, and the more real-time data you have, the easier it is to identify bottlenecks and drive efficiency. In this post, you’ll find insights and practical examples of how automation supports inventory management.
Optimize Supply Chain with Intelligent Automation
Data is the price of entry to the supply chain. Operations and supply chain scheduling took the form of multiple excel spreadsheets exclusive to the end-user alone. Given the challenges of today, disconnected silo planning is no longer sustainable. Like it or not, supply chain visibility will be the differentiator for leading companies.
Manufacturing RPA Definition and Overview
Physical robots for hundreds of years have streamlined manufacturing processes to be efficient and cost-effective. But there is still room for innovation in the back-end processes. The perfect solution to many businesses’ inefficiencies and errors is robotic process automation, also known as RPA.
How Automation Creates More Meaningful Work for Employees
The concept of meaningful work primarily has to do with employee satisfaction and fulfillment, and businesses that take this need seriously stand to capture greater value with staff doing more than transactional inputs.
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Leverage the Power of Intelligent Automation to Improve Order Fulfillment
With Intelligent Automation on your side, you can meet high customer expectations, keep costs lower, and empower your employees to be more effective and more satisfied with their work with your optimized order fulfillment process.
Begin your journey to optimized order fulfillment today by scheduling a consultation with our experts.
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