Order Fulfillment



What is this thing called ‘fulfillment’? Since those of us in warehousing are practical philosophers, in our case it refers to the filling of orders, or order fulfillment. That generally includes the warehousing and storage of products, the picking and preparing of shipments to retailers and consumers, and the integrated technology to support shipping those orders to be fulfilled. Order fulfillment can be very simple, or very complicated.

Most e-commerce order fulfillment is relatively straightforward – one or two items are placed in a box with protective material and a branded packing slip, a shipping label is applied, off it goes. That said, the integration with e-commerce website technology can be as complex as clients and their customers require: flat file integrations and APIs (application programmer interfaces) are generally used to pass orders from the website to Capacity for filling.

Order fulfillment to retailers, frequently involving EDI order fulfillment, is significantly more complex. First, you must be able to integrate with EDI. This involves mapping X12 data, howling at the moon, reading 300 page routing guides and generally pulling out your hair. We handle all this and more on our clients’ behalf. We have integrated with over 100 major retailers and have the most robust database of retailers, stores, DCs and all the label, ASN and other requirements.