Facility Settings
Within the backoffice section “Facility” our customers can manage their facilities themselves. Since facilities are a must-have for a proper order routing by the DOMS and for the In-Store Picking process it is important that information can be changed easily so that facilities are kept up to date.
General functionalities
We show all facilities of a tenant in a clearly arranged list in which the facilities are sorted by the zip code in an ascending order. Each facility has a name and an address consisting of a street, house number, zip code, town and country. Furthermore a contact person can be entered. Moreover every facility has a business type telling whether it is a Ship-from-Store business, a Click & Collect business or both. In order to handle different carriers in our tenant system one can assign different carriers to one facility. With this information a fencing can be implemented where orders which need to be shipped by a chosen carrier are routed to a facility where this carrier is active.
If a facility should not be choosable within the facility chooser one can set the status of a facility to the status offline. A facility with the status “suspended” can still be selected in the facility chooser.
Additionally, a facility will only be considered in DOMS routing decisions if it is set to “online” - facilities with status “suspended” or “offline” are ignored by the DOMS for upcoming order routings. This is true for both Click&Collect as well as Ship-from-Store facilities.
A facility has both an external as well as an internal name. The external name is for example used as the name of the sender address on a shipping label - and most likely features the company name itself. The internal name can be used to differentiate between the different facilities, like “Fulfillmenttools Cologne HQ”.
Based on the enabled carrier within the tenant, those carriers have to be enabled in turn for a particular facility as well. To do so, one can decide to enable a carrier one-by-one on facility level. A dedicated fence (see the DOMS section) ensures that only orders will be routed to a facility which has enabled the particular carrier the customer has chosen for.
A facility can be differentiated by its type namely whether it is a “store” with offline customers or a “warehouse”. In case the type “warehouse” was chosen, there is no possibility to set offline stock, since a warehouse does not have to deal with offline customers that walk in.
Service type
When setting the service type of a facility, the user is able to choose either “Ship-from-Store” or “Click & Collect”. Only facilities with the “Ship-from-Store” service type will be taken into consideration by the DOMS when routing a Ship-from-Store order. Additionally, only facilities with the “Ship-from-Store” service type will have the offline stock setting, because a facility that is “Click & Collect” only is not considered by the DOMS for routing decisions. Instead, the webshop already made the decision that this facility will get the Click & Collect order.
The service type has also impact on what can be seen and set in the settings-section within the backoffice as well as on which tabs one can access in the app.
Impact on the app:
The label section within the app is only shown if:
the service type “Ship-from-Store” is set for this facility
The Click & Collect handover section within the app is only shown if:
the service type “Click & Collect” is set for this facility
The Ship-from-Store handover section within the app is only shown if:
the service type “Ship-from-Store” is set for this facility
The switch (offering to order a label or picking another task) within the app when reaching EOP is only shown if:
the service type “Ship-from-Store” is set
Impact on the backoffice:
If one has selected a Click & Collect-only Facility and enters the backoffice settings the offline-stock setting is not shown as well as the setting for defining the replenishment timespan in case the infinite stock mode is active. We do this due to the fact that there is no routing logic for a Click & Collect Order and therefore those settings would not have any impact.
When setting up a tenant or when changes occur one can easily create a new facility or edit an existing facility within the frontend. Certain fields like the tenantFacilityId (see chapter 5.2.1 for an usage example) can only be added via the backend. Furthermore there is a possibility to delete an already existing facility within the backend.
Fulfillment process duration
It is possible to add a lead time or buffer time to each facility, which represents the average time a task needs to be fulfilled from the pickjob create timestamp to the event where the pickjob is ready to be shipped/picked up. In this way, it can be calculated whether successful completion at the site can be guaranteed.
The default when creating a facility is set to 240 minutes. This value can be changed via our API. When changing this value, it is used for all newly created facilities.
The user off our platform has the possibility to define
a SfS cutoff time for a specific facility carrier connection
a tenant-wide default value as well as
a tenant-wide cutoff time for click and collect orders via our API.
Those cutoff times in combination with the concept of a lead time, allows us to predict whether or not an incoming order can be fulfilled in time in order to be shipped via a certain carrier.
Fulfillment times
Fulfillment times is more or less equivalent to the opening times of a facility, yet can be different - for example the opening time of a facility might be from 09:00 - 20:00, but fulfillment might only happen between 10:00-18:00 due to whatever reason. Opening times can be set within our network view as well as in our facility view for a specific facility.
Fulfillment times are used at various places within our platform when it comes to timing. One occurrence is when a target time is generated (see 3.1.2) or when it is evaluated whether a time-triggered reroute should take place (see 2.2.8). For the latter, the counter for each picking task is only running within the fulfillment times of a facility. If the current time is outside the fulfillment time, counting is paused and will resume as soon as the fulfillment time is reached again the next day. Fulfillment times can be configured for each day individually. Additionally, certain days can have no fulfillment time at all, e.g. sundays or holidays.
Good to know
Because fulfillment times are playing a crucial role in our platform, there is also a fallback on tenant level in case those times are not configured for a specific facility. By default, those fallback fulfillment times are from Monday to Saturday, 09:00-17:00.
Fulfillment times and closing days for multiple facilities
Fulfillment times and closing days are configurable within the facility setting. Nevertheless there is also a function within the network overview settings where a user can set the fulfillment times and closing days for multiple facilities. This comes in handy if several facilities need an update or when one wants to set up a new tenant or introduce a bunch of new facilities to the platform. Here the user can also set the capacities for the set time slots. If this bulk update is saved already submitted times are overwritten.
Capacity
One can set a capacity for each fulfillmenttime - time slot within the facility settings in the backoffice and via API. The capacity is a number and reflects the possibility to fulfill an order. When routing an order to a facility which carries capacity information we reserve and block (reduce) a capacity for this order in the next available free capacity slot.
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