Operations

Order promising

Committing a delivery date or window to a customer at the moment of purchase. Classic order promising asks what inventory allows: available-to-promise checks stock, capable-to-promise checks whether supply can be made in time. A live operation also asks what capacity allows, checking real fleet and carrier availability before the commitment is made rather than validating it afterward. A promise made without capacity behind it is a forecast.

Where this fits

The day-to-day vocabulary of running deliveries. Routes, waves, drops, manifests, ETAs, SLAs. These are the units operators reason in, and the inputs every downstream model needs.

Related terms

SLA: Service-Level Agreement. The contracted performance threshold: on-time rate, delivery window, refund triggers. The thing operators are graded against.
Cross-dock: A facility where inbound freight is unloaded and reloaded onto outbound vehicles directly, without sitting in storage. Used to consolidate or reshuffle loads in transit.
ETA: Estimated Time of Arrival. The single most-checked field in any delivery operation. Quality of an ETA is a function of how live the data underneath it is.
BOPIS: Buy Online, Pickup In Store. The retail order pattern where a customer buys online and collects in person. On the operations side, it consumes pick-and-pack labor at the store rather than carrier capacity.
POD: Proof of Delivery. The artifact (photo, signature, geolocation, notes) captured at the doorstep that proves the drop happened. Increasingly verified by AI rather than by human review.