How to Design Flexible Fulfillment and Logistics Solutions in Retail

This PSFK Guide is a retail logistics innovation report for retailers and brands to better serve a growing audience of digital-first shoppers by turning to machine learning and artificial intelligence to deploy operational efficiencies.

Executive Summary

Retail operations, specifically those touching upon fulfillment, have been forever changed by the disruptions to daily life over the past almost-two-years. A rapid acceleration in digital behaviors has driven e-commerce growth to new heights, and ushered in a new era of shopper expectations around product order fulfillment as well as the overall delivery experience. Retailers are finding that their future success lies in meeting this new breed of customers’ needs and expectations for delivery convenience, flexibility, and self-service.

Report Overview

To help our community better understand and activate a new set of best practices in operational fulfillment, the PSFK research team has identified seven key strategies that they can use to reshape the future shopper experience by optimizing retailer capabilities to unlock necessary omnichannel value through fulfillment speed and efficacy.

What You’ll Learn In This Report

• How retailers can efficiently handle the ever-increasing volume of online orders being placed across a host of channels, including mobile, social media, websites, and even chat.
• Why shoppers want the flexibility of determining what products, goods, and services they want, when they want them, as well as how they want them delivered or returned.
• How retailers are designing flexible fulfillment and logistics solutions to better serve a growing audience of digital-first shoppers; deploying operational efficiencies like grouped orders to compress shipping time.
• Why retailers are turning to machine learning and artificial intelligence-powered solutions to alleviate supply chain bottlenecks as surging demand overloads existing fulfillment systems.
• How automated last-mile warehouses, driver-less delivery and next-generation technologies are enabling an exciting variety of impactful and innovative hybrid efficiencies within fulfillment operations.

What’s In This Report?

In this retail logistics report, the PSFK iQ research team looks at seven key trends reshaping the future shopper experience by optimizing retailer capabilities to unlock necessary omnichannel value through fulfillment speed and efficacy.

This retail logistics report provides:

• 7 trends-led next-gen fulfillment & logistics strategies
• 20 best-in-class examples of innovative fulfillment programs and the technologies driving them, including from Albertsons, Giant, Kroger, Saks Fifth Avenue, Target and more
• Consumer insights around expectations associated with fulfillment

Published on: Dec 12, 2021

Who Prepared This Report?

This retail logistics report was developed by the same PSFK research department that since 2004 has provided trends-led innovation consulting advice to Apple, BMW, Facebook/Meta, Google, Microsoft, Samsung and Volkswagen.