Reduce order processing costs through smarter orchestration

Supply Chain Solutions
Order Management and Commerce Engagement
Reduce order processing costs through smarter orchestration

Order orchestration software decides which fulfillment node ships each order, weighing inventory position, fulfillment cost and delivery promise before a pick ticket is created.

Every split shipment adds another label, another pack and another carrier charge. Static rules send stock transfers to nodes that never needed the inventory in the first place. Planners spend hours resolving exceptions a system should have caught. None of this shows up as one line item on a report. It shows up order by order, compounding with every unit of growth.

That gap between orchestration as a stated capability and orchestration that actually holds down cost to serve is where most operations teams get stuck. Infios Order Management (OM) closes it, replacing static rules and manual routing with automated, real-time order routing that reduced split shipments and weighs cost and service on every order.

The challenge: manual routing and static rules inflate the cost of every order

Every order that moves through a static rule set or a manual queue carries cost that a real-time system would have avoided.

Split shipment cost

A split shipment carries its own pick, pack and dispatch cost for every additional node it touches.

A meaningful share of orders ship across multiple fulfillment nodes when one node could have covered the order
No consolidation logic checks for a single-node option before a shipment gets committed
Split shipments add carrier cost without adding a service benefit the customer notices

Manual routing and exception handling

Every order that falls outside a static rule becomes a problem for the planner, not for the system.

Planners manually reroute orders that static rules can’t cover, which pulls time away from network optimization

Exception queues build up from orders the system cannot auto-allocate, slowing fulfillment and adding labor cost to every affected order

Escalated routing decisions get resolved case by case, with no consistent way to weigh cost against service

The cost of getting orchestration wrong

Fulfillment cost per order climbs with every avoidable split, transfer and manual override, and finance feels it before operations does. Without consistent routing logic, cost to serve becomes an estimate instead of a number finance can plan against. Customers notice too: inconsistent delivery performance from order to order erodes the experience a single fulfillment promise was supposed to protect. None of this is a reason to leave routing on static rules; it's a reason to automate it.

Is your availability number a promise or a guess?

Many order management systems calculate available-to-sell and call it available-to-promise. See where invisible inventory hides and how to close the gap without a rip-and-replace overhaul.

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The solution: how Infios OM automates cost-efficient order orchestration

Infios OM checks cost, inventory and delivery promise on every order, the way a planner would if they had time to check each one. Infios AI, the intelligence that powers Intelligent Supply Chain Execution™, is built into Infios OM, so routing decisions happen inside execution instead of waiting in a planner’s queue.

It weighs cost, promise date, margin and proximity before the pick ticket is released. Each capability addresses specific cost drivers.

Orders route to the fulfillment node with the right inventory available at the lowest cost to serve, without a planner checking each one.

Margin, scale and service start with order management

B2B leaders need order management and e-commerce working in tandem to protect margin across every channel. Get the case for running both on one set of rules.

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Business outcomes: what cost-efficient orchestration delivers

Once real-time routing, consolidation logic and automated exception handling are running underneath order orchestration, the cost points identified above turn into measurable savings instead. Operations teams running order orchestration on Infios OM can expect:

Up to 25 percent fewer split shipments, and the pick, pack and carrier cost that comes with them
Less planner time spent on manual routing and exception handling
More consistent order-to-dispatch performance across channels and nodes
Cost-to-serve visibility finance can use to plan and forecast, not just estimate

Use cases in action: orchestration that scales with volume and channels

Spirit Halloween handles 2 million transactions in a day

Spirit Halloween needed one view across retail, e-commerce and marketplace channels, and its legacy fulfillment systems couldn’t support record order volume. With real-time order orchestration and intelligent inventory allocation in Infios OM, connected to Infios Warehouse Management, the retailer ran 2 million transactions through OM in a single day and created more than 1.6 million orders over peak season. Buy online, pick up in store (BOPIS) rejection rates fell from 7 percent to 3.3 percent.

Read the Spirit Halloween case study

Komar replaces manual firefighting with real-time order flow

Once-daily inventory updates left Komar with oversells and stockouts, and customer service reps spent their time chasing missing purchase orders. Infios OM cut inventory refresh from 24 hours to 15 minutes and eliminated oversells across more than 25 digital, wholesale and marketplace channels. Order release dropped from 8 hours to 8 minutes, missing purchase order tickets fell 40 percent and TikTok Shop went live in under 6 weeks.

Read the Komar case study

Measuring order orchestration performance

A handful of metrics tell you whether orchestration is holding down cost or quietly adding to it. Track these against your own baseline, since a number that looks fine at network average can still hide a channel or node that's inflating cost:

Order orchestration is an efficiency project that also affects margin directly. The saving grows with order volume. The logic that cuts cost on 1,000 orders saves more on 1 million orders.

Getting started with cost-efficient orchestration

Most operations teams don't automate every routing decision on day one. Start with the channel or node combination that has the highest split shipment rate or exception volume. Prove the routing logic there, then expand across the network. Many customers go live in 16 weeks or less.

Talk to Infios about reducing your cost to serve through smarter, automated order orchestration.

FAQs

It's the layer that decides which fulfillment node ships each order, based on inventory position, fulfillment cost and delivery promise. Order orchestration software applies that logic automatically, instead of leaving it to a static rule or a planner's judgment.

See Infios AI handle the order exceptions that eat your day

Follow one order from the moment a shopper clicks buy to the moment it arrives, and watch Infios AI work through what breaks along the way: a wave of cancellations, a carrier gone quiet, an empty pick location. Infios AI recommends the fix and your team approves it, inside guardrails you set.

See Infios AI in action