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What is a Fulfillment Order

What is a Fulfillment Order

What are Fulfillment orders, when to use them, how are they different from a sales order?

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Written by Brendon Beebe
Updated over a week ago

Fulfillment Orders (FOs) within Luminous are specialized instructions created to manage and streamline the shipment of products from warehouses to customers. They represent discrete actions for fulfilling customer orders and ensure efficient management of inventory across multiple warehouse locations.

What Are Fulfillment Orders?

A Fulfillment Order is a system-generated or manually created order within Luminous that specifies how and from where items in a customer order will be shipped. They break down customer orders into manageable units based on warehouse stock availability, fulfillment priority, shipping preferences, and specific business rules.

Purpose of Fulfillment Orders

Fulfillment Orders help businesses:

  • Optimize inventory management: Allocate stock efficiently across multiple warehouse locations.

  • Automate shipping decisions: Use predefined rules and priority lists to determine optimal warehouse selection.

  • Minimize shipping costs and time: Group products effectively to minimize the number of shipments and reduce costs.

  • Simplify integration: Clearly define fulfillment details, enabling smooth integration with third-party logistics providers (3PLs), warehouses, and shipping platforms (e.g., Shipstation).

  • Enhance customer satisfaction: Ensure accurate and timely fulfillment, reducing errors and improving order delivery reliability.

Capabilities within Luminous

Using Fulfillment Orders within Luminous enables you to:

Automated Generation

  • Automatically generate FOs based on Fulfillment Priority Lists and available stock, optimizing warehouse selection.

  • Minimize the number of FOs created by efficiently grouping products.

Manual Creation

  • Manually create and edit FOs to handle custom fulfillment scenarios or specific business requirements.

Fulfillment Priority Management

  • Assign Fulfillment Priority Lists to products, which determine the sequence of warehouse groups considered for fulfilling orders.

  • Set a default priority list to ensure consistency when a specific list isn't assigned to a product.

Advanced Product Handling

  • Utilize settings such as "Always Fulfill Separately" to create individual FOs for specific products or kits, ideal for products requiring special handling or packaging.

Flexible Shipping Controls

  • Define how and when FOs are automatically created, choosing from immediate generation upon order creation, scheduled/delayed processing, or fully manual triggers.

Clear Visibility and Management

  • View and manage FOs directly within the Sales Order interface and dedicated FO management screens.

  • Clearly track FO status, shipment details, carrier tracking, and fulfillment history within Luminous.

Use Cases

Common scenarios benefiting from Fulfillment Orders:

  • Splitting large customer orders across multiple warehouses based on inventory availability.

  • Special product handling, such as items shipped separately due to packaging requirements or product sensitivity.

  • Batch processing orders at scheduled times to optimize fulfillment workflows.

  • Managing fulfillment efficiently for orders from various sales channels, including Shopify, Amazon, EDI integrations, and manual entries.

Fulfillment Orders are foundational for effective and efficient inventory and shipping management within Luminous, enabling businesses to maintain control, enhance operational efficiency, and provide exceptional service to their customers.

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