Scenario: Fulfillment sourcing rules

Promising rules are essential for timely and accurate deliveries to customers. By applying Promising rules to the delivery of certain items, you help ensure that customers receive their deliveries on time and in the most cost-effective way. Destination-based sourcing is used to define conditions around a destination before you ship to certain locations. Carrier service restrictions provide you with options to help ensure the safe delivery of items that require special handling.

As part of order fulfillment, seller organizations must adhere to certain business constraints or regulations. For example, to fulfill an order that is greater than $1000, you must use an insured node to mitigate any risk of package loss. Additionally, if the shipping destination is California, then specific sets of nodes are chosen due to their license and compliance requirements.

In Sterling Intelligent Promising, the fulfillment manager defines the business constraints by creating Promising rules. By defining business constraints, accurate delivery estimates and valid fulfillment nodes are determined for each order.

Destination-based sourcing

Destination-based sourcing is configured as part of the existing Promising rules when the fulfillment destination has special handling requirements and regulations. For example, if an item is hazardous, you mandate that these hazardous items are fulfilled from approved locations only that are licensed to ship these items. In the Promising rule, you specify the following conditions:
  • City
  • Country
  • State

When the destination matches the approved locations, the fulfillment sourcing rule is applied. Sterling Intelligent Promising considers all the destination-sourcing constraints for an order that is being shipped before it provides a valid location. For more information, see Promising rules.

Carrier service restriction

As a fulfillment manager, you can choose from many carrier services when you ship items to customers. On certain occasions, you might want to restrict the delivery of items to certain carrier services until a specific condition is met. For example, you might have an item that requires special handling, when:
  • A dangerous item that contains hazardous chemicals.
  • An item with a regulated address, such as a military base.

In these circumstances, you can restrict the fulfillment solution to one or more carrier service providers who qualify for the final stage of the delivery.

Scenario: Applying destination-based sourcing and carrier service restrictions

A hardware store called ABC hardware supplies is selling an iron remover product in their e-commerce store. There are two business constraints:
  • The shipping of the iron remover to California state must be fulfilled by a distribution center, as their store does not have a valid permit to ship it by mail.
  • UPS Ground is the only carrier service available that handles the shipping of dangerous chemicals.
In this scenario, the fulfillment manager creates a new Promising rule to specify the following business constraints:
  • The State is set to California.
  • The Item ID is defined as FE_REM for the iron remover.
Next, the node restriction for the DC is configured as the DC_SoCal distribution center and the carrier service restriction is defined as UPS Ground. For more information, see Fulfillment rules.

As a result, accurate delivery estimates are provided to the customer when they add iron remover to their carts. By using the Promising rules in Sterling Intelligent Promising, the fulfillment manager helps ensure that products are delivered in the most optimal way to the customer. For more information, see Managing Promising rules.