
Overview
This case study gives a walkthrough of an e-commerce store with customers residing in the USA. The store sells products curated by worldwide vendors based in countries like India, China, and Italy. It relies on international and domestic carriers to deliver an exclusive range of products to its customers.
Problems
There were two challenges that were prominent. Firstly, issues in order fulfillment were being addressed reactively, that is, the problems were addressed after an escalation or incident. With transactions ranging in millions of dollars and above, every issue escalated was not just an impact in the present but a possibility of something that could significantly impact the business in the future.
Secondly, as the order delivery involved multiple international carriers, understanding the terminologies of every carrier and the functioning of vendors available in different countries was another challenge.
Process
The Objective was to optimize order fulfillment by providing them with expertise, tools, and processes to achieve the same. Working on the business exceptions gave the PitStop Crew first-hand experience with the issues in the system. The system was constantly changing based on knowledge gained while resolving these issues. The vendor onboarding process was redefined, with test orders in place to ensure a smooth status transition in order fulfillment.
Intelligent processes that efficiently taught the business and customer SLAs, were integrated, giving an easy outlook to any concern well in advance. At this point, the PitStop tool came into the picture, an all-in-one tool integrated with the Shopify storefront for all the stakeholders to view real-time information on their inventory, supply chain, logistics, and operations, all on configurable dashboards, increasing the application responsiveness 10X. Enabling the stakeholders to track the whole order cycle right from initiation to fulfillment, ensuring a prompt and frictionless experience for customers.

Impact
With the use of Pitstop, there was a significant decrease in order cancellation and a consequent increase in order creation. There was a reduction of around 30% in order cancellations and 20% in the returns creation. The number of orders created and allocated increased by 40%.
The Pitstop Crew along with the tool helped change the approach to resolve business exceptions from reactive to proactive with multiple checks in place throughout the order cycle. The number of incidents reported was less and the time taken to investigate and resolve the rare reactive issues was reduced significantly.
Good initative by 91social team