Fences

Introduction

Fencing is a concept which describes an absolute requirement for a routing decision. If a facility cannot meet the requirement of an order the facility is excluded from the routing decision. This can lead to a situation where no facility can meet the requirement of the order. If this is the case the order is brought back to the pool and is included in upcoming routing decisions or becomes unroutable.

Overview of pre-defined fences

The predefined fences below are available.

Stock availability

[ “Complete Stock” ] / complete fulfillment of individual order Checks if all articles of an order are available within the facility. This check calculates the stock and reserved stock in.

Please note that the complete Stock fence can not be combined with order split

Service type

Checks if the service type of the order (Ship-from-Store Standard / Ship-from-Store Same Day / Click & Collect) can be fulfilled by the facility, see DOMS Configuration for more elaboration.

Preselected Facilities

Reduces the facility candidates which should be considered from all facilities within the network to only specified ones. This list may contain 1..n facilities and is only applicable for Ship-from-Store Orders, see DOMS Configuration for more elaboration.

Carrier availability

Checks if the carrier the customer has chosen for is enabled in a certain facility and thus can fulfill the order, see Settings for more elaboration.

Custom attributes

(e.g. special services, carrier capacity, facility capacity, shipment destinations, delivery date…)

Same Day possible

(checks if there is a facility which has the service type ship-from-store and at least one active Same Day carrier AND whether there is enough time for the facility to perform a Same Day delivery? (Today´s date + buffer time < cut off time of that Same Day carrier), see Same Day for more details.

Country

checks if the address of the facility is within the same country as the address of the consumer. Only those facilities are taken into consideration.

Facility Capacity

checks if there are any free capacity slots available for a facility within a predefined timeframe in the future (see Facilities for details and examples)

Ensure minimum picking

checks that at least 1 ordered item is in stock. If this is not the case the facility is not considered in order routing Items which are bundled so that they are not split within routing (see: custom services) are considered as one in this fence. Meaning that if one item is missing in such a bundle all items within this bundle are seen as missing.

Static and reactive fences

A fence can be a static fence or a reactive fence.

A static fence is a fence where there is no event trigger. If an order becomes unroutable because of a static fence this order will remain in the unroutable order section.

A reactive fence has an event trigger. This means that our systems constantly check for events which might dissolve this fence so that the order becomes routable. For now, only the “complete stock” fence can be set as a reactive fence. If an order becomes unroutable due to an out of stock situation and the items are pre-/backorderable, the order gets routed automatically if stock becomes available.

In order to know which reactive fences would have made an order unroutable we sort the sequence of fences from static to reactive and make sure that all reactive fences are processed with all entities. One fence would be enough to make an order unroutable but we need to know which other reactive fences would have been activated. By this we collect information about all filter reasons.