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Intelligent Promising with IBM Sterling

IBM Sterling Intelligent Promising combines inventory and capacity visibility with sophisticated fulfillment decisioning to help retailers maximize inventory productivity, make reliable and accurate order promises, and optimize fulfillment decisions at scale.

Transform your business with IBM Sterling Intelligent Promising

1. Maximize inventory productivity: Use real-time inventory visibility to confidently expose inventory and maximize conversions, gaining granular control over inventory actions, such as safety stock setting based on configurable business rules. Improve inventory turns by applying additional context like channel, fulfillment type and labor availability when making available-topromise decisions.
2. Make and manage order promises: Improve conversion rates by confidently delivering order and delivery promises across every step of the shopping journey, including the product list page, product detail page, cart, and checkout. Automate the review of inventory, capacity and costs to make informed promises, and harness powerful AI during fulfillment to simplify complex scenarios like orders with third-party services, and support a wide range of fulfillment options.
3. Optimize omnichannel profitability: Set operating performance objectives and KPIs using real cost drivers (like distance, labor, capacity, and carrier costs) and profit drivers (markdown, stockout), so you can confidently make the best fulfillment decisions for your business objectives. By optimizing across thousands of fulfillment permutations in milliseconds, retailers can ensure balance between profitability and the best customer experience

Intelligent inventory insights to enhance the shopping journey

Retailers can more profitably provide reliable promises for any fulfillment option, which begins with a global view of real-time inventory, including available-to-promise (ATP) inventory, capacity to process orders at different locations, and transportation availability. Without this insight, retailers may overpromise, losing revenue due to stockouts and order cancellations that cause missed sales opportunities in-store and online.

Complexity is increasing with diverse fulfillment options. Profitable delivery and pickup promises require sophisticated cost calculations early in the shopping journey, so retailers can make promises that improve customer satisfaction and the bottom line.

Features & Highlights

IBM Sterling Intelligent Promising offers standard rules and configurations, with AI capabilities, to provide retailers with the growth path that best fits their commerce transformation.

1. Inventory visibility: Provide a single, scalable, real-time view of inventory and demand across data sources, including insights into global inventory ATP, inventory thresholds and supply-demand matching.
2. Reliable delivery promising: Increase online sales with accurate promise dates at each step of the shopper journey, using advanced rules that dynamically consider actual cost, including aggregated data from carriers. Convert all factors into actual and comparable costs when determining what promises can be made and kept.
3. Artificial Intelligence-infused execution: Optimize fulfillment execution and inventory levels to improve cost-to-serve and balance operations with industry-leading machine learning technology.
4. Fulfillment optimization: Use AI with learned sell-through patterns to understand potential stockouts, demand shifts, markdowns, shipping costs, labor costs, and capacity so that retailers can make sourcing decisions that balance costs and service.
5. Simplified deployment: Deploy as a microservice to easily integrate with existing systems. With simplified configuration, business users can configure rules and objectives easily without IT support.
6. Scalable technology: Introduce a modern, scalable architecture that delivers highperformance, pre-purchase promising, accommodates for highly complex scenarios such as multi-brand orders, and optimizes across many fulfillment permutations efficiently.

IBM Sterling Intelligent Promising

IBM Sterling Intelligent Promising fuels commerce profitability and shopper loyalty for the world’s most progressive retailers.

1. Without IBM Sterling Intelligent Promising

   • Batched inventory view causes inaccuracy for shoppers
   • Lack of accurate and reliable delivery or pickup information causes lower cart conversion
   • Sub-optimal sourcing decisions due to lack of insight
   • Challenge in offering omnichannel fulfillment profitably

2. With IBM Sterling Intelligent Promising

   • Real-time inventory view at product list page, details page, cart and checkout
   • Early, accurate and reliable promising across the shopper journey to increase cart conversions and upsell opportunities
   • Maximize profit and service levels with fulfillment optimization
   • Support for wide range of fulfillment experiences, ensuring best customer experience at lowest cost