Cost-based checkout

IBM® Sterling Intelligent Promising offers cost-based optimization promising to help calculate the delivery date and time and shipment breakup for prepurchase order scenarios.

Cost-based optimization for promising optimizes orders based on various cost factors, which helps to minimize shipping, processing, and node balancing costs. You can use the Calculate pre-purchase shipment assignments API to understand how orders are optimized before any orders are placed. This API helps you make sourcing decisions to fulfill orders at the minimum cost.

Sterling Intelligent Promising considers the following cost factors to determine the sourcing solution that has the minimum cost:

Cost of shipping from the sourcing location.
Cost and efficiency of labor at the sourcing location.
Cost of the risk that is associated with a markdown.
Cost of the risk that is associated with the stockout or loss of sale due to multichannel demand.

Sterling Intelligent Promising also offers cost-based checkout calculations. In cases where a shopper or a fulfillment manager prefers to minimize the overall cost to fulfill the order, they can select Apply cost optimization as their fulfillment preference. When the shopper or fulfillment manager selects Apply cost optimization as their fulfillment preference, Sterling Intelligent Promising prioritizes the reduction of various cost factors such as shipping, processing, and node balancing costs.

By default, the Get Optimized Checkout Plan (Pre-Purchase) API assumes that the nodes are operating at finite capacity. However, you can update node capacity by using the Insert or update available capacity API.

To understand how cost-based optimization works for promising delivery dates and sourcing solutions in a real-time scenario, see Scenario: Calculate prepurchase shipment assignments and minimize the cost-to-serve.