Project Description
Bol is changing retail to make daily life simpler for 13 million Dutch and Belgian customers, in collaboration with 49,000 partner sellers on our tech platform, offering a diverse range of around 41 million products with peak sales reaching 1,800 orders per minute.
To address the challenges posed by our extensive logistics operation, handling approximately 500,000 daily shipments from our five large warehouses, we embarked on a project to enhance the oversight of our complex logistics network. The objective was to develop tools that could predict the logistical network’s evolution over the next 24 hours and facilitate stakeholders in running simulations to assess reactions and pinpoint potential bottlenecks.
This involved creating a forecast using shop orders for simulation purposes. A detailed simulation of the order sourcing flow was developed, transforming shop orders into warehouse orders and simulating them through the outbound flow. This comprehensive simulation provided valuable insights into the utilization of outbound processes such as picking, packing, and carrier delivery. Stakeholders could adjust parameters like capacities to gain a deeper understanding of utilization and logistical costs. Frequently, new simulations were automatically run to evaluate the effectiveness of the logistical network. The results were presented through a web application developed by our engineers, offering users the functionality to interact with the simulation and compare different scenarios.