April 2018 | Build 3.7.2
Improvements
Zone Picking
One of the biggest time sucks in any maturing fulfillment operation is travel time. Over the course of a day, all that time spent walking through the store, from location to location really adds up. Even with optimized pick flows, the more steps you take and ground you cover, the more time you will lose. For stores with a sufficient order volume, a better alternative to walking the entire store is to employ a Multi-Order, Zone Pick strategy. This approach allows you to divide your store up into multiple smaller geographic zones so that you can allow your store associates to focus on fulfilling all order picks within their specific zones, thus reducing the amount of time that anyone person must travel, allowing more picks for more orders over a smaller geographic footprint.
While ShopperKit has always supported implicit zone picking via multi-user order sharing, this new release brings and explicit zone picking functionality. To begin taking advantage of zone picking, you must first define the various logical zones for your store. In the Admin Portal, within the Store level menu, you will notice a new menu option labeled Zones. From here you will define a zone by giving it a name, and then by assigning all of the corresponding Sections. After you have defined your zones, you may then, optionally, assign one or more zones to your users.
Once your zones and (optionally) users have been setup, you will be able to access the actual zone picking functionality through a new menu option in the ShopperKit client application labeled Orders by Zone. The Orders by Zone option is very similar to the existing Orders view, but instead of listing all orders for the store, it will only list those orders that have picks within the relevant zones. When accessing this option as a user who is already assigned to Zones, your list will immediately be filtered to only display orders with picks in those zones. When coming in as a user who has not be pre-assigned zone assignments, you will be allowed to select the zones that you want to focus on. Zone selections will be persisted throughout the login session, and can be changed at anytime.
Check out the following brief video to learn more. (Video coming soon)
Order Status Alerts
In June 2017, ShopperKit released our Lead Time Rules feature. With this release, we have enhanced this functionality to include alerting based on Order status. Just as before, the Lead Time Rules functionality is defined at the store level. Now when defining a new rule, you will choose between Item Category or Order Status rules. Item Category rules provide the same functionality as they always have, but the Order Status rules are new. Both Item Category and Order Status rules let you define a messages to be sent via email and/or SMS to a list of recipients. Unlike Item Category rules, which are triggered by specific order item conditions, the Order Status rules are triggered based on the order's current status value relative to the order's promise time.
A few common use cases for this feature are:
- For low order volume stores, send an alert when a new order is within 4 hours of it's promise time.
- Send a text message to the team when an order is less than an hour from promise time but picking hasn't started.
- Send an email to the eComm manager when an order is past it's promise time but not yet ready for Carryout.
When defining Order Status Alerts, you will specify the number minutes from Promise Time that should trigger the alert. You will then choose a Status Condition and an Order Status value.
The available Status Conditions are:
- Is At Least
- Is Equal
- Is Less Than
- Is Not Equal
These status conditions are used to evaluate the order based on the order's status and time remaining from promise time. The available order status values are as follows:
| Seq | Status | Description |
| 1 | New | Order created by grocery customer |
| 2 | In Progress | Picking process has been initiated |
| 3 | Staged | Ordered items have been picked and staged |
| 4 | Ready for Carryout | Order has been settled and is ready for carryout |
| 5 | Completed | Order is done and has been fulfilled |
The following is an example of a rule that will send an alert for any orders that are 30 minutes from promise time that are not yet ready to be Carried out.
Order Receipt Download
Very often, we we receive requests to provide copies of the customer's signature that is captured on the order summary. In the past, we have only been able to provide the signature itself. Now we are saving the signature and the entire order summary report for which it was captured. In addition to saving the signed order summary report, we now make these available to you for download from the Admin Portal.
You will now notice a new option within the Client Admin menu label Order Receipt. From here you may search for a specific order number. Provided the order number has a saved Order Receipt, the document will load in an in-browser PDF viewer for you to save off to your local file system. If the order number predates this release, then the order signature will be displayed instead.
Enhanced Store Setup
With this release we have made it easier to setup new stores in ShopperKit. Instead of relying on ShopperKit support to upload your new store data, or spending a lot of time trying to edit your existing stores in the face of a reset, you can now use the new Store Upload Feature. This feature allows you to build out your stores Sections, Shelves and pick flow mappings using a simple Microsoft Excel template, and upload that file to ShopperKit. As an option, you may choose to clear out all existing Section and Shelf data first. If left unchecked, the upload will be treated as an update. Please use caution when clearing out existing data.
In addition to upload new stores from an Excel file, you may now choose to create a brand new store by copying one or more defined attributes from an existing store.
Please contact support@shopperkit.com for a copy of the excel template.
Default Role Permission Overrides
Accessibility to certain features and functions inside ShopperKit are based on user roles. Occasionally, there is need to override a roles default permissions. A good and recent example of this, is to allow users who belong to the Delivery Driver role to receive notifications when customers send in the Carryout Arrival Text. To configure an overrides, please contact support@shopperkit.com.
Issues
- Prevent the order list from jumping to the end of list on refresh.
- Allow user to increment quantity when using the manual input in Add Items.
- POS Icon is not refreshing and appearing after order has been staged complete.