Distributed Order Management System (Routing)
Our distributed order management system (or short DOMS) helps you route orders. To find the optimal facility for fulfilling each order, there are fences (must criteria) and ratings (which facility is the best). Whereas in old times, there were static rulesets, the fulfillmenttools platform enables them to be dynamic, choosing the best facility at the moment. This page shows how to configure the DOMS using the REST API. This can also be configured when logged in as an administrator via the Backoffice.
Fences
Fences work a bit like filters as they filter out facilities that don't match the defined criteria. LU.XY wants to give its customers a great experience, so they want the service type ordered and the service type offered by the facility to match. They are connected to a marketplace that decides from which facility LU.XYcan fulfil. To have the DOMS handling, we need to enable these fences:
Service Type
Preselected facilities
Ratings
After we fenced some facilities out, some facilities will be left. Without any ratings between those, the facility receiving the pick job would be picked randomly by the platform. To distribute the pick job between the facilities, the DOMS allows us to rate each facility in terms of fulfilling that pick job.
LU.XY prefers the facility closest to the customer and with the fastest delivery speed. As the employees have KPIs based on their performance, the workload should also be balanced between the facilities. Additionally, they have categorized their stores into A stores and B stores. A stores perform very well with walk-in customers which is why they want to prefer the B stores for online orders. Therefore these ratings come into place:
Geodistance
Workload balancing
Custom fence based on the facility rating
We will get into those ratings into detail in a bit. To make every customer as happy as possible, they want to try out splitting orders, which means we also have to active this feature in the routing ruleset.
Apply the standard routing rules
More Routing-Configurations-API information can be found here: REST API documentation - Routing-Configurations
Now we can set the other routing options. First, we should GET the current ruleset.
globalRoutingConfiguration.defaultPrice: This is used for the maximizing turnover rating and should be a standard value for the industry, e.g. 500 EUR for tech, 100 EUR for fashion.prioritizationRules: has no more impact today.routingRule.fences: Here you can find all fences there are available without using customized ones. To active the ones we talked about earlier, we need the propertiesid,activeandactiveMode.routingRule.ratings: Here you can find all fences support by default. The propertymaxPenaltydescribes the weighting that each rating has in the routing decision. For example amaxPenaltyof 2 is not as important and has a lower weight thanmaxPenaltyof 8. This could be any number. By default you can set this penalty in the frontend between 1 and 10, in the API higher values are possible.orderSplit: Here, you can either activate or deactivate the split of orders.
In our case, we want to activate the order split and the fences mentioned above. The weighting of the ratings would look like that:
GEO-DISTANCE 1
WORKLOAD-BALANCING 4
Using the PATCH routing configuration endpoint, we can set the desired the desired rules:
Set facility rating
The facility rating is done using a tag for the rating which is patched to the facility. Therefore, we first need to create a tag prior to linking that rating tag to a facility.
More Tags-API information can be found here: REST API documentation - Tags
Now we can add this tag to a facility using the facility endpoint with a PATCH call:
The platform will then answer with a 200 OK response containing the whole facility object:
Configuring the DOMS toolkit (custom rules)
In some cases, the routing configuration the fulfillmenttools platform offers by default does not exactly match the customer's needs. We introduced the DOMS toolkit to give you the best routing experience possible and offer even more routing rulesets. In the case of LU.XY fashion, we need a rating for certain facilities. This can be done using the mentioned toolkit.
DOMS Toolkit
The DOMS toolkit compares two entities of this list:
order
facility
carrierconnection
The left side is usually an order, the right side might be something else. The toolkit then looks for certain values in the left entity and then rates the existance of certain properties in the other entity.
In LU.XY's case we want all orders to be compared, therefore we need a property which is always present. As every order contains an ID, we expect that value not to be an empty string. For the facility, we need the facilityRating tag set above to match the value B in order to give all facilities rated as B-stores a rating. fulfillmenttools recommends 40 in that case to give this the highest priority.
More Toolkit-Rating-API information can be found here: REST API documentation - Toolkit-Rating
The store ratings and routing weights are:
A stores: 20
B stores: 40
C stores: 60
Every custom rule needs its own API call.
We have successfully configured the routing rules for LU.XY fashion. Please keep in mind that DOMS can be a complex topic, especially when you're at the start of your integration. If you need any help, your professional services representative is always happy to assist you with the routing configuration.
Last updated