E-commerce Fulfillment Major Challenges

E-commerce is powerful growth engine across the logistics landscape. Businesses ranging from retailers to manufacturers to distributors are all adjusting their supply chain accommodating for the E-commerce dynamic.

With this type of growth comes additional challenges:

• Capacity Planning: With a steady upward trajectory, E-commerce is putting a strain on existing resources and forcing companies to consider significant new investments. At the same time, week-to-week demand can be volatile, stretching scarce human resources to the breaking point and reducing customer service. E-commerce fulfillment must be able to both flex with short-term fluctuations and scale with sustained growth.

• Customer Expectations. Today's e-commerce customers have higher expectations than those of even a few years ago and those expectations. Two-day delivery will almost certainly be compressed to next-day or same-day delivery. Organizations struggling to meet today's requirements risk being left behind by competitors who are able to consistently meet these changing expectations.

• Complexity. Inventory management, order processing and shipping all get more complex when e-commerce is introduced. In addition, integrating e-commerce fulfillment into traditional distribution operations to provide multi-channel distribution further adds to the complexity in support of omni-channel retail sales.

Many organizations have the experience and expertise to understand the new dynamic but need the resources to efficiently manage the speed, volatility and complexity of e-commerce fulfillment. Optimization processes and smart use of emerging technologies simplifies e-commerce management, reduces order cycle times and shortens the time order clicks can be fulfilled for targeted delivery expectations.