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.

Please see here for the API documentation.

Overview of pre-defined fences

The predefined fences below are available.

Complete stock

[ “Complete Stock” ] / complete fulfillment of individual order Checks if all ordered items are available in the facility. This check already considers reservations and other stock that is not available for certain reasons.

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.

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.

Carrier availability

Checks if the carrier the customer has chosen is enabled in a certain facility and thus can fulfill the order.

Custom attributes

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

Same day delivery 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.

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 fulfillment capacity slots available for a facility within a predefined timeframe in the future.

Ensure minimum picking

Checks that at least one 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 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 the sequence of fences are sorted from static to reactive and make sure that all reactive fences are processed with all entities.