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TaskServerä and eCommerce Fulfillment

E-commerce fulfillment consists of all the things you do to satisfy a customer’s order after it is placed. Although fulfillment is a crucial ingredient for the success of e-commerce, the current crop of e-commerce software products do not sufficiently address the needs of e-commerce business owners.

Fortunately, TaskServer™ can be plugged in seamlessly to rectify the need for a robust automated fulfillment solution. TaskServer™ is, in fact, the optimum fulfillment tool for integration in existing e-commerce systems, including Microsoft’s popular Site Server.

To understand why TaskServer™ provides a ready answer for e-commerce fulfillment needs, let’s first take a look at the gap in current methods. Then we’ll illustrate how TaskServer™ can eliminate the gap because TaskServer™ can automate and track virtually all fulfillment functions.

Problem

A typical e-store allows a shopper to browse through a catalog of products, add products to a shopping cart and check out the shopping cart items, using a credit card to pay for the purchases. Next, the business operator must fulfill the customer’s order.

A fulfillment center, either in-house or external, is notified of the purchase. Typically, the notification that triggers the fulfillment process is sent as e-mail. A number of fulfillment scenarios are common:

• The shop owner uses the services of a large, commercial fulfillment house that maintains the inventory for the shop owner and handles the fulfillment. Such large fulfillment houses may have elaborate and expensive information and product processing systems, costing upwards of a $1 million.

• The shop owner uses the services of a small-scale fulfillment house. These “Mom and Pop” fulfillment houses are now cropping up everywhere. They don’t have the volume or the resources to justify investment in million-dollar fulfillment systems, but they will maintain a shop inventory and handle fulfillment. for smaller e-businesses.

• The shop owner keeps his or her own inventory and handles fulfillment internally.

In a small fulfillment house or when the shop owner handles fulfillment in-house, after an e-mail message arrives with a new order, the following tasks have to be performed:

• Someone reads the e-mail.

• A person to handle the fulfillment (a fulfiller) is assigned manually.

• The fulfiller packages and ships the products ordered.

• The fulfiller (or someone else) performs the necessary back-office tasks. Typical tasks include updating the inventory database, taking the steps necessary to replenish the inventory, scheduling pick-up, sending hard copy confirmation to the customer, etc.

For e-businesses with a very limited sales volume, the fulfillment process described above may be able to function manually, albeit awkwardly. But for medium- and high-volume shops, the manual fulfillment system is very inefficient and can produce epidemics of errors. And because larger shops have dozens of workers, manually assigning fulfillment tasks is usually very painful. Manual assignment also will invariably result in some people with too much work while others are idling.

Larger shops also tend to have greater division of labor and workers have narrower skill sets. The person who packs the products may not have the skills or authority to update the inventory database, for example. This segmentation of skills means that every customer order must be routed through multiple groups of people with different, isolated responsibilities. You can see why manual processing means that as the shop gets larger fulfillment becomes progressively more difficult, inefficient and error-prone.

TaskServerä offers the Solution

An ideal fulfillment solution is a system that automatically routes each order through the different groups of workers, in the correct sequence. The system must be capable of intelligent task assignment so that all staff members are kept equally busy, avoiding the situation where some employees take on too much work while others have little or none.

The system should also facilitate addition or removal of workers at will. This allows the business to easily accommodate changes in sales volume due to seasonal factors and other fluctuations.

It is also essential that the automated fulfillment system is flexible enough to accommodate custom-developed or commercially available software agents. Such agents can altogether eliminate manual intervention for certain tasks such us updating the inventory database or interacting with other legacy systems. The system should be able to calculate shipping charges in real-time by interfacing with systems provided by UPS, FedEx and other shippers, for example.

When a large warehouse is involved, the business may also want the option of equipping its packers with handheld devices such as a PalmPilot™ or a Windows CE machine, eliminating the need for the person to return to a workstation to get new assignments. As an assignment is checked off by the packer on the handheld device, the system would automatically initiate the next step in the fulfillment process.  

All of the above and more can be accomplished with TaskServer™. To understand how TaskServer™ functions as an e-commerce fulfillment engine, you’ll need a basic understanding of TaskServer’s functions and features. The TaskServer Technical White Paper will give you more detailed information. A brief description of TaskServer™ concepts is provided below.

A task is the central entity in TaskServer™ and represents an atomic unit of work or action. Tasks are requested by a Requester and fulfilled by a Fulfiller. Requesters and Fulfillers can be people or software objects.

A task has information associated with it. This information is needed by the Fulfiller to fulfill the task. Tasks assigned to a Fulfiller appear in the person’s in-box. Double clicking on a task in the in-box displays the Information associated with that task.

A task is not directly associated with a Fulfiller. Instead, a Task is associated with a Service Unit. That way, one or more Fulfillers can be assigned to each Service Unit. When a task is requested, the task is forwarded to the Service Unit and then reaches one of the unit’s Fulfillers. This feature is very significant in e-commerce fulfillment since it allows grouping of people by their skills or functions (into a Service Unit) and automates the assignment of work to each Fulfiller within the unit.

There may be dozens of packers, for example. When an order arrives, TaskServer™ automatically forwards it to a packer who has the least number of orders in his in-box. Once the packing is complete, the next step may be to update the inventory database. When the packer checks off the task as complete, TaskServer™ then automatically picks a Fulfiller from a Service Unit responsible for updating the database and immediately initiates the database task for that Fulfiller.

TaskServer™ also allows multiple tasks to be grouped together in a Task Group. Tasks within a Task Group can be sequenced so they are executed in a predefined order. And since tasks in a Task Group may be associated with separate Service Units, each task in the Task Group can be fulfilled by a different group of Fulfillers. For example, the Task Group “Ship Order” may comprise the tasks “Package Order,” “Label Package,” “Deliver Package to Shipping Facility,” and “Load Delivery Vehicle.” Each task in the Task Group can be associated with a different Service Unit (like the warehouse, mailroom, couriers, and loaders.) TaskServer™ applies intelligent, load-balancing algorithms when assigning Tasks among each Fulfiller in each Service Unit.

Here’s a short example of how TaskServer™ is actually used for fulfillment:

• Once the shopper has checked out shopping cart items, all pertinent information regarding the order is sent to TaskServer™. This information can be sent as e-mail or, in the case of Microsoft Site Server, through a COM API call.

• A Task Group in TaskServer™ is executed. The Task Group contains all the tasks representing the fulfillment process of the e-business. For the purposes of illustration we’ll describe three typical tasks in the Task Group.

“Task One” is used by the packing and shipping department. “Task One” will contain the order information and will be routed to the in-box of one of the Fulfillers in the department. Remember, as order volume increases or decreases, you can add or remove Fulfillers to this group using TaskServer’s friendly user interface.

“Task Two” automatically updates the inventory database. “Task Two” has a software Fulfiller associated with it. This Fulfiller could be a Visual Basic program that interfaces with the inventory system, deducting the actual number of items shipped.

“Task Three” is routed to the accounting department. “Task Three” is used to generate and send hard copy confirmation to the customer, update customer records, etc.

As the orders start pouring in, TaskServer™ automatically assigns the work and tasks appear in the in-boxes of the various Fulfillers.

TaskServer eCommerce Components

Using TaskServer™ for e-commerce fulfillment requires the following add-ons that do not come with the basic TaskServer™ package.

• TaskServer E-Mail Adapter. If your fulfillment center is notified of orders through e-mail, you’ll need the TaskServer E-Mail Adapter (TEA). It monitors incoming mail and executes Task Groups as appropriate, providing an automated link between your mail server and TaskServer™.

• Site Server Adapter. If your e-business uses Microsoft Site Server™, you can avoid manual notification through e-mail altogether. TaskServer™ can instead be integrated into Site Server’s Commerce Pipeline with this prepackaged adapter that calls Task Groups using a COM API.

• TaskServer Matrix Object. Tasks usually carry information needed by the Fulfillers. For human Fulfillers, the content and layout of the task’s accompanying visual information can be designated with TaskServer’s administrative editors. Using the editors, you’d select the user interface objects such as data fields, list boxes, combo boxes, text areas, radio buttons, check boxes, etc. At the time a task is initiated, these interface objects are loaded with real data. However, standard Windows objects are not suitable to represent typical e-commerce order information. An order usually contains information about each item like the SKU, a product description, price, quantity, etc.

To display order information in a standard fashion as part of a task, TaskServer™ employs a matrix object. A matrix object is very similar to a spreadsheet. When designing the order fulfillment task, you place a TaskServer Matrix Object in it and specify the columns for SKU, product description, etc. When the task is initiated, the matrix object creates the number of rows equal to the rows in the shopping cart and automatically fills in the values.

One other very powerful feature of the TaskServer Matrix Object is that you can add columns that will be completed by the Fulfiller. In the diagram above, the “Quantity Shipped” column must be completed by the Fulfiller. If the “Quantity Shipped” is less than “Quantity Ordered,” a subsequent task (with a software fulfiller) can automatically schedule a “Back Order” task that will direct the purchasing department to replenish inventory and fill the order as soon as possible. With such intelligent automation provided by TaskServer™, the possibilities in e-commerce fulfillment are virtually unlimited. 

 File Synchronization

Tasks in a TaskServer™ Fulfiller in-box can be synchronized with handheld systems such as a PalmPilot™ or Windows CE device. This feature is useful in large warehouses where it’s desirable for Fulfillers to work untethered.

TaskServer™ offers unsurpassed potential to bring new efficiencies, greater flexibility and higher reliability to your e-commerce fulfillment process. And, TaskServer™ can be implemented quickly, without extensive programming or user training. Best of all, employees find TaskServer™ makes their jobs easier to accomplish since it helps relieve management stress and clearly establishes task expectations. For additional information, please e-mail us at  info@taskserver.com, or call 603.881.9191 .