Allocation Engine
- eknoor.singh (Unlicensed)
As part of MCM Basic, Allocation is done on defined rules in Allocation Rules where specific rules are maintained in order to arrive at a final carrier based on the type of the order. However, defining multiple rules is always cumbersome but the most challenging task is managing those rules. For a business spanning multiple countries and having a list of carriers, the rules can easily cross over in thousands. This is where the allocation Engine comes into picture.
Allocation Engine is an encapsulation over the allocation rules where the system takes everything in its own hands and does the work of calculating these rules on the fly. When business defines rules the intention is generally to ensure a certain business logic which may be delivering orders at super fast speed or at the cheapest cost or maybe with highest delivery accuracy. With allocation rules this was manually done based on known factors but the allocation engine takes everything into account and lets the user only define criteria like allocate all Cash on Delivery orders to the carrier providing cheapest rate or allocate all PREMIUM orders to the carrier providing fastest delivery.
This way the rules are limited from thousands to just a few (very well under 50 even for a large business). However, there are cases when certain things must always be true and can be defined as part of rules. For example if we know that in a certain remote region only one carrier is serving then for that particular region we can directly assign a carrier using allocation rules as before. The best part here is that the system first checks if there are any predefined rules matching the criteria and if not then it uses the allocation engine. This way the rules are kind of exceptions which must be checked and hence it allows the user to build the allocation logic in any possible manner.
If the allocation engine is enabled and nothing is defined in the engine, the system automatically factors in the default rule to allocate orders to the cheapest followed by the fastest carrier.