Business intelligence design for live piloting of order fulfilment centers

Order fulfillment centers focus on fast paced timely preparation and outbound shipment of customer orders from a large mix of temporarily stored inbound products acquired to satisfy these orders. In order to be both price and service competitive, such fulfillers thrive on real-time synchronization and bee-hive efficiency in highly turbulent demand and supply. Originally conceived for simpler slower pace warehouses and distribution centers, warehouse management systems (WMS) have been transplanted for use in fulfillers. They help fulfillers survive the complexity, yet at the cost of lower productivity and service levels. This paper proposes enhancing WMS with Business Intelligence to create a Fulfiller Piloting System (FPS). The aim is to enable smart live piloting of fulfillers, exploiting the real-time feed of information from both sides of the fulfiller's demand and supply network, as well as from its internal operations. A FPS drives for dynamic distributed synchronization of operations and optimization of decisions by a combination of human and virtual agents, with the objective of higher overall productivity and service.