Benefits report

Easily view your accumulated benefits and understand the total impact of using IBM Sterling Fulfillment Optimizer with Watson with Benefits report.

Accessing the Benefits report

  1. Log in to Order Hub.
  2. Select Fulfillment > Benefits report from the menu. If you do not see this option in the menu, ask your administrator to assign you the Fulfillment Manager role in Order Hub.

Overview

Benefits report provides insight and visibility into the benefits that you obtain by using the inventory model to fulfill your orders.

Fulfillment Optimizer optimizes your orders to avoid stockout and markdown. The results of the optimization are based on user-defined parameters and pre-defined parameters. These parameters are then used to generate the Benefits report.
  • Pre-defined parameters are determined by Fulfillment Optimizer based on selling trends from your data.
    • The pre-defined parameters are internally tagged with the SCENARIO1 scenario ID and consider the following factors:
      • Shipping cost
      • Stockout avoidance cost
      • Markdown avoidance cost
      • Processing cost
      • Load balancing cost
  • User-defined active parameters are set by you in the Optimize parameters workspace. Enable the Show optimization objective settings option to view the weights that you configured for these business goals.
Benefits report contains data in the following sections for the selected timeframe:
  • Net benefits
  • Aggregates
  • Node breakdown
The Net benefits table displays the total shipping and inventory benefits that you've obtained within the selected timeframe.

  • The values within the Shipping benefit column display the benefits you've received in overall shipping costs since you've been using Fulfillment Optimizer. These numbers are calculated by comparing the difference in results with and without using Fulfillment Optimizer.

    The values within the Inventory benefit column display the benefits that you've received in relation to stockout avoidance, markdown avoidance, and artificial markdown reduction since you've been using Fulfillment Optimizer.

You can also view the benefits that are obtained for the set of Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). These benefits are displayed based on the optimization objectives.
  • The Aggregates tab contains information about the net benefits that were obtained using the optimization parameters that are associated with the shipping, capacity, and processing cost models. For a complete list of the associated KPIs, see Aggregate KPIs.
  • The Node breakdown tab contains information about the net benefits that were obtained for node-related KPIs. For a complete list of the associated KPIs, see Node breakdown KPIs.
Note: Benefits report is generated from the data that is available in the transaction logs.