Professor Rita Difrancesco, EADA Business School, on “Optimal In-store Fulfillment Policies for Online Orders in an Omni-channel Environment”

Professor Rita Difrancesco (Dr. WHU 2015) is currently Assistant Professor of Operations at the Department of Marketing, Operations and Supply of EADA Business School in Barcelona, Spain.

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Abstract:
The explosive rise of e-commerce drives an increased need for responsive omnichannel fulfillment, which creates new challenges in inventory management and order fulfillment. In this paper, we study the optimization of the virtual and physical inventory at the retailer operating in an omnichannel environment. We use a simulation-based approach combined with exploratory modeling to prescribe optimal inventory and fulfillment policies under a variety of sources of uncertainty for online orders from physical retail stores. We apply our method to a case study with data from a leading sporting goods retailer in order to test our results.