Transfer rules
Transfer rules can be used to transfer inventory from a sourcing node to a fulfillment node in your fulfillment network for customer pickup or delivery from that node to the customer. Transfer rules also define the set of nodes and carrier services in your fulfillment network.
Defining transfer rules improves the accuracy of the estimated delivery and pickup dates provided to your customers, reduces end-to-end duration between order placement and cart fulfillment, and better aggregates shipments per customer order reducing operations costs, and improving customer experience. The transfer rules operate on similar criteria to sourcing rules with the addition of attributes to match a specific sourcing node for more tailored use cases.
When Sterling Intelligent Promising evaluates a shipping estimate, first sourcing rules are used to limit nodes considered for final hop fulfillment. Then, each valid sourcing node has transfer nodes and carrier services to consider that are evaluated on business constraints such as whether the sourcing node is of type STORE, or whether the cost of a specified order line exceeds the threshold. Inventories at matched transfer nodes for each sourcing node are considered for final hop fulfillment.
Transfer rules provide flexibility to help your fulfillment manager to define the scenarios that the inventory transfers should consider. Currently, these configurations are supported for pre-purchase item pickup and delivery estimates, and pre-purchase cart pickup and delivery assignments.
Inventory transfers
Inventory transfer enables consideration of inter-node transfer time in the calculation of promising dates.
As a retailer, you might list inventory on your website that is sourced by a vendor. Sometimes it happens that your customer orders an inventory but it is not available at the vendor's sourcing location. It might cause inaccurate estimation of delivery date and checkout calculations. In certain cases, the missing inventory needs to be transferred from the sourcing node where the inventory is available to the fulfillment node. By considering time consumed for inter-node inventory transfer in promising calculations, accurate delivery date can be promised.
To improve accuracy of delivery date estimation and checkout calculations, Estimated Delivery Date and Calculate Checkout Assignments APIs are enhanced with inventory transfer. It allows the APIs to check whether the inventory transfer is required for a missing inventory. If the inventory transfer is required in Ship to store (STS) or Ship to Home scenarios, the APIs consider inter-node transfer time in the calculation of promising dates.
What to do next
You can create or delete the transfer rules. For more information, see Creating transfer rules in Order Hub and Creating and deleting transfer rules by using APIs.
View the scenario that describes how to create transfer rules for different delivery methods. For more information, see Scenario: Transfer rules.