Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Personalized Delivery and Fulfillment Optimization

Explore the joint optimization of order fulfillment processes and personalized delivery options in e-commerce during this 28-minute seminar by Quan Zhou from McGill University. Delve into a collaboration with a North American online platform, examining how customers choose from personalized fulfillment options or opt out of purchases. Learn about the retailer's periodic fulfillment decisions and their reliance on multiple logistic providers. Discover the modeling of customer behavior using a discrete choice model and the formulation of joint optimization as a stochastic dynamic program. Examine the proposed tractable deterministic approximation and computationally efficient heuristic with performance guarantees. Investigate extensions to complex scenarios affected by fulfillment speed, cost, and order value. Analyze real datasets from an industrial partner to understand the value of personalizing fulfillment options and joint optimization with fulfillment assignments. Gain insights into the importance of demand management through personalized options when customers prioritize quick fulfillment and capacity is limited, as well as the critical role of optimized fulfillment operations when customers are more willing to wait.

Beyond One-Size-Fits-All: Personalized Delivery and Fulfillment Optimization. Quan Zhou