The retail industry is undergoing many changes to gain the favor (read: wallets) of the consumers. The reason behind these changes lie within the changing customer behavior and the shift to online retail. Retail organizations, resellers, omni channel resellers and daily deal resellers invest more and more in “clicks” rather than in “bricks”.
Order tonight? Delivered tomorrow!
The change towards online retail asks for a well-balanced cooperation between webshop, fulfillment and transportation. The consumer expects that once he orders something before 11 pm it is delivered to him the next day. Even better would be to get his order the same day. And when possible even on Sunday.
The challenges for retail fulfillment
The customer has successfully been seduced. Time for action.
Congrats. You have successfully seduced your customer to purchase a product. Now it is time to make sure that the product is processed and delivered as cheaply, quickly and efficiently as possible. The order that the webshop has send contains information about the client, the product (type, color, size), personal data and the preferred method of delivery.
The complexity of the ordering process
After the order has been accepted the warehouse management system (WMS) wants to know the new storage position and the status of the specific order. If the order has already been sent to the consumer than it wants to know what the track and trace information is for the consumer. The track and trace information has to come from the transportation company. This transportation company can vary for every order due to the specifications of the delivery (e.g. price, country of delivery). A number of other important factors influencing the order delivery process are the expected 24/7 availability, peak times (morning, afternoon and evenings), the peak at the end of the year and the accompanying high order volumes.
Until now we are only talking about the “happy flow”. But how does one cope with issues such as fraud? Which can occur during the payment and delivery but also when a product is returned. How do you quickly and efficiently detect these threats and how do you arrange your security? Can this be a part of the same process?
How can integration help?
Smart linking
The question is how we link the information sources and needs in a smart way. How can we create a system in which ‘one size fits all’? Many retailers and fulfillment organization still use file exchange in batches. Which works fine, but the developments in the past 5 to 10 years have moved on. Customers, and other parties involved in the order delivery process, expect and often demand that the orders are linked in a modern way (mostly webservices). The realisation of the link has to be implemented quickly, efficiently and safely. Even more important is that the webservice can be trusted and can easily be adjusted to future wishes and demands.
Microservices
These increasing expectations and demands ask for a well-designed integration platform with the right level of governance. However, it needs to maintain practical. In other words: a good and quick time-to-market is required, the investment needs to be predictable and the services reusable. Microservices are a good solution to achieve this.
We combine the years of experience of our integration specialist with our integration acceleration solution AORTA to face these integration challenges.
100% faster development
AORTA is a configuration-driven integration accelerator, with a collection of tools, intelligent endpoints and functional routers that complements Oracle Fusion. Projects delivered based on AORTA have the unique capability to achieve a high degree of parallel development. The result is 100+% acceleration of development and increased quality assurance of the entire project.
