An important goal for multichannel retail companies with different stores is to ensure a high level of availability. In order to be able to achieve this goal, the right stocks must be kept at the right locations for sales orders that the retailers can reach via various channels (e.g. call centers, e-commerce).
Within the Distributed Order Management (DOM) in Dynamics 365 Commerce and Dynamics 365 Supply Chain Management, it is possible to set up different storage and sales locations that cover the order requirements from the distributed inventory and thus to reliable order fulfillment.
To use DOM it is necessary to activate the parameter “Activate distributed order management” under “Retail and Commerce > Distributed order management> Set up> DOM parameters”. Within this form it is possible to provide further information, e.g. to enable the use of road distance calculation (and confirmation of Bing map usage for DOM) for the calculation of distances.
Furthermore, depending on the respective business requirements, DOM rules can be defined in order to control the order distribution. On the one hand, the rules are based on information specific to the locations, such as storage location grouping (= fulfillment group) and locations (= fulfillment location). On the other hand, DOM rules for distribution can be created according to categories, products and article variants.
The following setting options are available:
- Minimum inventory rule: This rule blocks a definable minimum inventory for the specified items or item variants for the DOM, which stores the individual fulfillment locations e.g. required for walk-in customers as inventory.
- Fulfillment location priority rule: A hierarchy can be defined here, according to which orders with certain articles are distributed to prioritized fulfillment locations or fulfillment groups. If the rule is defined as a hard constraint rule, orders are brokered only to locations that priorities are defined for.
- Partial orders rule: Here it is determined whether order quantities can be split for sales orders or sales order lines and whether it is desired that all items of an sales order can only be served from one fulfillment location.
- Offline fulfillment location rule: Specification of fulfillment locations or fulfillment groups which should be unavailable to DOM.
- Maximum rejects rule: This rule defines the threshold value from which an order or an order item is no longer available for distribution by the DOM. Rejected lines are marked as an exception and put back into the pool for processing in the next run. When the rejection count hits the threshold that is defined, DOM will mark the order line as a permanent exception and won’t pick the line for assignment again. DOM will consider the order line again for reassignment only if a user manually resets the status of the order line.
- Maximum distance rule: Specification for the maximum distance from the fulfillment location to the delivery address of the order.
- Maximum orders rule: Definition of maximum number of orders that a location or group of locations can process during a calendar day.
A DOM rule is shown below, which has a maximum distance of 200 miles between the storage location and delivery address:
The rules described can be limited via the start and end dates as well as via the “Disabled” check box and their validity. With the setting option “hard constraint” it can be determined whether the selected rule is used for two iterations (= yes) or is no longer taken into account after a repetition (= no).
Companies, DOM rules, the sales origin and modes of delivery can be setup within the fulfillment profiles. Fulfillment profiles thus offer the possibility within a company to control different behaviors (through DOM rules) depending on the order basis and mode of delivery for the order distribution.
The DOM is executed within a batch job, whereby a fulfillment profile must be selected.
The following criteria, in addition to the fulfillment profile, influence the result of the DOM batch order:
The results of the batch processing can be checked under the dashboard “distributed order management”. Under the tile “fullfilment plans” it is shown how the processed order items were distributed to the respective fullfilment storage locations.
The results of DOM processing can also be seen in the processed sales orders. Here the “DOM status” provides information about the result of the batch processing.
As a further sales order function, possible locations can be made via sales order line function “Update line > Suggest fulfillment location” directly when entering the order.
With their many years of experience the specialists at Dynamicon support multichannel trading companies in various industries in optimizing and systematically mapping their processes for various supply chains in Dynamics 365.
Please arrange an initial meeting or workshop with our experts on your requirements in the area of supply chain optimization.
Find out more information from Microsoft here