Today's retailers have to find profitable strategies to deliver on their customers' expectations, amid significant fulfillment challenges and complexities. Customers don't understand the massive omnichannel fulfillment operation that is set into motion when they click "Buy Now." Whether they purchase a product on your e-commerce site for home delivery or order a product to be delivered to your nearest brick and mortar location, customers want immediate inventory availability, fast shipping and a seamless end-to-end purchasing experience. Here's a closer look at how AI and cognitive technologies are helping improve omnichannel fulfillment in a world of rising customer expectations, free 2-day delivery from the competition, and rapidly shrinking margins. What does intelligent fulfillment look like?

Today's retailers have to find profitable strategies to deliver on their customers' expectations, amid significant fulfillment challenges and complexities. Customers don't understand the massive omnichannel fulfillment operation that is set into motion when they click "Buy Now." Whether they purchase a product on your e-commerce site for home delivery or order a product to be delivered to your nearest brick and mortar location, customers want immediate inventory availability, fast shipping and a seamless end-to-end purchasing experience. Here's a closer look at how AI and cognitive technologies are helping improve omnichannel fulfillment in a world of rising customer expectations, free 2-day delivery from the competition, and rapidly shrinking margins. What does intelligent fulfillment look like?

New research has shown that grocery retailers are struggling to optimise stock replenishment processes, with almost half saying that their decisions are still based on'gut feeling'. Retail applications provider Blue Yonder surveyed 750 grocery managers and directors in the US, UK, Germany and France. It found that, in spite of a rise in accurate algorithms for automated replenishment and demand planning, 46% of surveyed directors in the UK say that replenishment is still an entirely manual process and the same amount saying that it was fully automated. A further 30% believed that instinct-based decision making was slowing them down. Of the four countries involved in Blue Yonder's survey, Germany had the highest proportion of respondents using manual or partially automated systems, with just one-third of managers who had fully automated their stock replenishment processes.