Routing inventory to your warehouse locations
If your organization is growing, chances are you’ve got (or would like to have) multiple locations where your ship your product from. You may even have several fulfillment vendors throughout the country or world and would like to intelligently route orders to the correct organization.
Well, we’re happy to introduce location routing in Orderwave 2.0. Some of you savvy Orderwave users may already know about (and use) this feature, since it’s been around for a few months now, but until now, we haven’t done a formal introduction.
What is location routing? It’s a dynamic way to tell Orderwave what type of orders should be routed to which locations – based on items, geographic destination, item availability, or customer type. You can even mix and match combinations of these rules to create the most efficient system for your company.
Let’s start with some examples…
Multiple fulfillment vendors
You’ve got your inventory sitting at your fulfillment vendors locations, or even multiple warehouse locations under the umbrella of the same vendor. If the locations are distributed around the country, you may want to think about using geographic location routing. This type of routing compares the orders’ delivery address to your shipping table and allows you to route to locations based on the best match. You might have different shipping rates in your shipping table for Alaska and Hawaii, and you might only want orders to those states to be shipped from California – or you may setup your shipping table to route based proximity to the closest fulfillment location.
Item (SKU) based routing
Some fulfillment locations only contain certain items – so it’s an absolute must that the orders be fulfilled from those locations. When you setup your location routing this way, you’re ensuring that items will definitely ship from certain locations.
Routing based on availability
It’s a possibility that you don’t really care where it ships from, you just want to make sure that you’re depleting the inventory that you already have. In this case, you’ll want to enable availability routing. This type of routing looks at the QOH (quantity on hand) of your warehouses and routes the order based on where it will successfully ship from, with a preference on depleting the most available inventory first.
Routing based on customer type
When you’ve got your customer list setup in Orderwave (entirely optional), you can assign groups to your customers and use these groups as a way to route your fulfillment. You may only want to ship orders to your distributers from your warehouse/fulfillment vendor, while taking care of the customer orders from your own office.
Any of the above types of rules can be enabled concurrently, meaning that you can combine them. In this case, you can setup one of the rules as a “tie-breaker”. If more than one rule applies to the order, the tie-breaker will win and route the order according to its settings.
