Case Study
Designing Fulfillment Across a 45-Location Retail Network
A growing retailer built ship-from-store and BOPIS capability across 45 locations — requiring routing logic, inventory accuracy infrastructure, SLA design, and ecommerce integration to make omnichannel fulfillment operationally viable.
Executive Lens
Read the patterns, decisions, and risks behind the work.
Relevant Services
Custom Software Development / Technology Assessments
Engagement detail
Context, requirements, and the controls that governed the work.
Context
A multi-location specialty retailer was experiencing increasing customer demand for same-day and next-day delivery options it could not competitively serve from a single distribution center. The store network represented significant distributed inventory that was invisible to the ecommerce channel. The business needed to activate stores as fulfillment locations without creating operational chaos for store teams or an oversell problem that damaged customer experience.
Requirements
Ship-from-store capability for 30 priority locations, BOPIS across all 45. An order routing engine that allocated orders based on inventory availability, customer proximity, carrier pickup windows, and SLA targets. Integration between Shopify (ecommerce), the warehouse management system, and the ERP for inventory position and financial reconciliation. Store-level fulfillment operations capability — hardware, process, and training — for pick-pack-ship. Performance reporting on SLA compliance, unit cost, and oversell rate.
Controls Applied
Inventory accuracy program implemented before go-live: weekly cycle counts for the top 200 SKUs per store, shrink controls review, and a formal process for adjustments. Hard accuracy threshold (95%+ for stocked items) required before a store was activated for SFS. SLA monitoring dashboard with daily review. Oversell escalation process defined before launch — automatic hold and customer notification for any order that could not be fulfilled within SLA. Store volume ramped gradually over 60 days, starting at 5 SFS orders per day per store and increasing based on performance.
Operating lessons
Patterns and decisions that apply to similar transformation work.
Inventory accuracy is the foundational prerequisite. Activating SFS before stores reached the accuracy threshold resulted in oversells that cost more in customer service, refunds, and brand damage than the incremental revenue justified.
Per-unit SFS cost is 30–50% higher than DC fulfillment at typical mid-market volumes. This must be modeled and accepted as a strategic investment in delivery capability before the program launches, not discovered after go-live.
Routing logic needs to account for carrier pickup schedules, not just inventory position and proximity. An order routed to a store with available inventory but a carrier pickup in 22 hours will miss a next-day SLA that the DC would have met.
Store manager engagement before launch is more valuable than store manager training after launch. Managers who understood the business rationale ran better programs than those who received only operational instructions.
Build the exception management process before the exceptions happen. When an order is routed to a store and the item is not actually on the shelf, you need a defined process for resolution that does not require a human to manually manage each case.
Relevant services
The services most directly connected to this engagement.
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