Insights

Online ordering and in-store pickup have become commonplace today. But have you ever encountered a situation where an app shows an item is in stock, yet you wait for ages at the store while staff scramble through shelves and bins to finally find your product? What is the problem? After all, a store is not a warehouse. Shelves must look attractive, and aisles must remain spacious; the “secret space” truly available for rapid picking is often just a few dozen square meters in a corner.

In such a limited space, hundreds of products compete for room—should shampoo or snacks be stocked? Should there be 10 units or 50? Choose correctly, and orders ship out instantly; choose incorrectly, and customers wait while profits quietly slip away.

This challenge, which haunts countless retailers, now has a new solution. Professor Jiang Zhengrui (Jeffrey) from the School of Management and Economics (SME) at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen (CUHK-Shenzhen), collaborated with Jia Qian from the College of Management and Economics at Tianjin University and Syam Menon from the Naveen Jindal School of Management at The University of Texas at Dallas to complete the paper Enabling Ultra-Fast Online Order Fulfillment: Efficient Inventory Management for In-Store Micro-Fulfillment Centers. The research team deeply deconstructed inventory decision-making issues for in-store micro-fulfillment centers, finding a way for small warehouses to release big profits. Recently, the paper was published in the INFORMS Journal on Computing, a top-tier journal in the fields of operations research and management science.

About the Author

Jiang Zhengrui (Jeffrey)

Professor

SME, CUHK-Shenzhen

Research Field

Business Intelligence and Analytics, Optimization/Decision-making under Uncertainty, Diffusion of Technological Innovations, and Economics of Information Technology

Co-authors

Qian Jia

College of Management and Economics, Tianjin University

Syam Menon

Naveen Jindal School of Management, The University of Texas at Dallas