Scenario: Transfer rules

Transferring inventory across nodes is important to manage the inventory levels strategically across all the locations of your fulfillment network. You can transfer inventory to optimize the distribution of items and to ensure that inventory is always available across some strategic locations only. Sterling Intelligent Promising provides you with the ability to create transfer rules to transfer inventory across nodes when, for example, stock becomes low at certain locations. This feature helps you to maintain an adequate supply of items at transfer nodes to provide inventory to the ready-to-ship nodes and fulfillment nodes when required.

Transfer rules

Creating a transfer rule helps you to calculate the estimated delivery date for an item precisely. You can determine the carrier transit time to transfer the item from the transfer node to the fulfillment node. Transfer rules are beneficial during the following scenarios:
  • Pick-up in store collection.
  • Items that require special-handling at specific fulfillment nodes, for example, bikes.
  • Bundle fulfillment at a packing node.
  • Maintaining low inventory at a few fulfillment nodes.
  • Reducing packaging costs.

A transfer rule is considered only after all the Promising rules are evaluated first. The main role of a transfer rule is to determine the route that an item takes when it is transferred from one location to another.

The transfer rules are matched based on the following conditions.
  • Item
  • Fulfillment node
  • Custom sourcing attributes

Transfer nodes

You can maintain inventory across several locations but that can be costly if this inventory isn't managed properly. It is important to have the flexibility that Sterling Intelligent Promising provides to transfer inventory from a distribution center, for example, to a store at peak times to satisfy customer demand. You can specify certain transfer nodes across a few locations only to hold the bulk of the inventory to distribute across many different fulfillment nodes. In using this approach, you maintain most of your inventory at transfer nodes to distribute to the fulfillment nodes. This approach helps you to maintain low levels of inventory across most of your fulfillment nodes to fulfill the online, pickup, and in-store orders.

Transfer rules and customer pick-up

Transfer rules work in the backend to allow transfer nodes to send inventory to a final-hop fulfillment node before the items are packaged for fulfillment. This approach provides more options to the business for inventory distribution that is visible in the pickup flow:
  1. To minimize costs, only a small batch of the item is kept at each store to satisfy walk-in and pickup orders. Bulk inventory is stored in a distribution center. Strategically, the fulfillment manager selects a few distribution centers to act as transfer nodes. These nodes maintain large quantities of the item to support high-volume transfers.
  2. When a customer places an order for pickup, the distribution center transfers inventory to the node for client pickup. Also, the item is transferred quickly from the transfer node to the store during an inventory stock-out.

To configure transfers, a new class of rules for transfers is available. These rules are used to define the transfer nodes to transfer inventory to a specific fulfillment node.

To define the requirements for items to be picked up for ship-to-store scenarios, you can use the Checkout Assignment APIs. For more information, see the Get Checkout Shipment Plan (Pre-Purchase) and the Get Optimized Checkout Plan (Pre-Purchase)APIs.

Example: Transfer rules for store pick-up and home delivery

Scenario: A shopper orders 4 t-shirts and 4 pairs of shoes for either stop store pick-up or home delivery by 30 October.

As the items are not available at the store, transfer rules can be created to fulfill the order from transfer nodes, such as distribution centers. Then, from there the items can be shipped to the store for pick-up or to the customer's address as shown in the following diagram:

Summary
  1. Firstly, the Woodbury transfer node has 3 t-shirts and 3 pairs of shoes that are available for transfer to the Colonie transfer node.
  2. The Colonie transfer nodes accepts transfers only and it accepts the transfer of 3 t-shirts and 3 pairs of shoes from Woodbury.
  3. Next, the Colonie transfer node has 1 t-shirt and 1 pair of shoes available that can be included in the delivery.
  4. Finally, Colonie is the fulfillment node that is selected to deliver the available and transferred items to the store or to the customer's home address to meet the 07 November delivery date.

Transfer Rule restrictions

  • The New Paltz transfer node doesn’t have all the items available and it can only transfer t-shirts. Also, the delivery date is too soon to meet the customer delivery date.
  • The Colonie transfer node only accepts transfers and it can't transfer any items to another node. However, this node can deliver items to other nodes, such as a store for pick-up or a home address.
For this scenario, the optimal transfer node is selected that has available inventory for transfer to another node. Then, the inventory is sent from the transfer node to the store or to the customer's home.

Sample Checkout Assignment API response

You can refer to the following sample for updated checkout assignment response with transfers.
{
   "earliestDeliveryTime":"2024-11-07T12:00:00.000Z",
   "latestDeliveryTime":"2024-11-07T12:00:00.000Z",
   "backordered":[ ],
   "cartLines":[
      {
         "lineNo":2,
         "itemInfo":{ "itemId":"T-Shirt", "unitOfMeasure":"EACH", "productClass":"NEW", "segment":"MERCH", "segmentType":"ONLINE" },
         "quantity":4.0000
      },
      {
         "lineNo":1,
         "itemInfo":{ "itemId":"Shoes", "unitOfMeasure":"EACH", "productClass":"NEW", "segment":"MERCH", "segmentType":"ONLINE" },
         "quantity":4.0000
      }
   ],
   "shipments":[
      {
         "shipmentNo":1,
         "fulfillingNode":"Colonie-NY",
         "carrierService":"FedEx_Ground",
         "expectedShipTime":"2024-11-07T12:00:00.000Z",
         "deliveryTime":"2024-11-07T12:00:00.000Z",
         "cartLineList":[
            { "lineNo":2, "quantity":4.0000 },
            { "lineNo":1, "quantity":4.0000 }
         ],
         "transferShipments":[
            {
               "transferShipmentNo":1,
               "transferredFrom":"Woodbury-NY",
               "transferCarrierService":"FedEx_Ground",
               "transferShipTime":"2024-11-06T12:00:00.000Z",
               "transferDeliveryTime":"2024-11-06T12:00:00.000Z",
               "transferLineList":[
                  { "lineNo":1, "quantity":3.0000 },
                  { "lineNo":2, "quantity":3.0000 }
               ]
            }
         ]
      }
   ]
}

When using transfer rules to meet customer orders, it’s important to consider shipment quantities and shipping requirements as these impact the inventory that is available to ship and the inventory that you can transfer to meet a customer order.

In this example, one transfer occurs comprising of 3 t-shirts and 3 pairs of shoes from the Woodbury-NY transfer node.

At the Colonie-NY transfer node, one shipment is supported containing 4 t-shirts and 4 pairs of shoes that are sent to the store for customer pick-up or to the customer's home address.

Note: The transferDeliveryTime is the same as the expectedShipTime in this sample because the processingTimeForInboundTransfers is set to 0 seconds. Increasing this duration adds some buffer time for processing inbound transfers before you allow for the final hop fulfillment.