Rapid fulfillment of online orders in omnichannel grocery retailing

Establishing innovative fulfillment options for online orders has become a key challenge bricks-and-mortar retailers. A mere focus on store sales is no longer affordable due to the competition by pure players. Retailers are continuously developing new approaches order and last-mile logistics. Further shortening lead times becoming even more important in this context. One recently developed concept omnichannel approach where existing structures utilized distribution centers (DCs) local stores integrated into holistic concept. This especially relevant when retailers providing fast delivery services (e.g., same hour delivery). It resembles multi-depot vehicle routing problem all facilities act as depots assigned based processing transportation costs well available capacity. We address present novel rapid grocery retailing. empirically identify decision-relevant develop an evaluation of overall costs. Our work considers assignment heterogeneous each depot depending depot-specific using tailored cluster-first-route-second heuristic. show that can reduce average 7.4% compared from DCs. However, at remain significant cost factor, DCs will always have some relevance cannot entirely be replaced stores. results highlight importance modeling actual decisions network.