Many warehouse management systems (WMS) were designed originally to support the operating models of traditional brick-and-mortar and catalog-based retail. In those models, the pool of orders for a day was predetermined and fixed. Optimizing the facility was all about creating the best plan: the sequencing and grouping of how orders were activated, and planning inventory and pick paths to maximize SKU affinity and minimize walking. The plan could be executed in static, pre-planned waves. Most facilities had a relatively small number of direct-to-consumer orders. Work volume was concentrated in large, store replenishment orders. Facilities had relatively static order profiles and could optimize people, processes, and automation equipment around those profiles.
With the growth of e-commerce, the model changed. The volume of direct-to-consumer orders increased exponentially. With the shift, the requirements for the facilities evolved:
- Facilities can no longer depend on a relatively stable order profile. The order profiles that facilities have to process are smaller (typical e-commerce order is 2.5 eaches) and more dynamic.
- The number of SKUs required to support an e-commerce operation is normally significantly larger than for brick-and-mortar retail applications as e-commerce needs to offer outlier sizes and colors that are typically not stocked at the stores.
- The “hot SKUs” change week over week, making SKU slotting and inventory optimization more complex and less beneficial.
- Further, retailers face elevating customer expectations and competitive pressure from the largest retailers around faster shipping and order processing. Customers now expect and demand next-day and same-day shipping. Order pools are no longer static and trying to operate based on pre-planned, static batch waves is too slow. Changing waves is complex and creates wasted idle time.
Fulfillment Engines is the most flexible warehouse execution system (WES) for e-commerce and omnichannel retailers.
- Fulfillment Engines helps retailers improve warehouse agility by adapting your manual fulfillment operations to support dynamic order profiles on the fly efficiently using self-balancing, enhanced bucket brigades.
- Customers are also able to support same-day order processing cost-effectively using Fulfillment Engines for waveless fulfillment. Fulfillment Engines activates new orders continuously as capacity becomes available in the warehouse. This allows retailers to begin processing urgent, same-day orders as quickly as possible and without the cost, waste, and complexity of re-planning waves.
Contact us to learn more about how Fulfillment Engines can help you reduce your labor costs by 20% to 40% and optimize manual fulfillment of e-commerce and omnichannel orders.