Order, Inventory & Warehouse Intelligence

Route every order to the optimal fulfilment node in under 200 ms — balancing cost, SLA, carbon, and capacity in real time.

When an order is placed, ClearOPS fires a routing evaluation against every eligible fulfilment node simultaneously. Each node is scored on four weighted axes: shipping cost (fetched live from carrier APIs at the moment of order, not cached rate tables), SLA feasibility (can this node ship by the required carrier cutoff?), carbon footprint (distance × weight × carrier emission factor), and available pick capacity (current queue depth at the node). The winning node is assigned in <200 ms. Every routing decision — including the scores for every rejected node — is written as an immutable event on the order timeline, so you can audit exactly why an order went to Warehouse C rather than Warehouse A six months later. Split-order routing handles scenarios where no single node can fulfil the complete order: ClearOPS partitions line items across nodes, issues sub-shipments with individual tracking, and presents the customer a unified view. Manual override is always available for staff; overrides are recorded on the timeline with the operator ID and a mandatory reason field.

• Live carrier rate fetch at order time — UPS, FedEx, DHL, USPS, Royal Mail, AusPost
• Four-axis weighted scoring: cost / SLA / carbon / capacity
• Split-order routing with unified customer tracking view
• Full routing audit trail on every order timeline
• Manual override with mandatory reason capture
• <200 ms median routing decision, p99 under 400 ms

Append-only optimistic reservations eliminate row locks and keep inventory accurate at 100k RPS — zero oversells, sub-second reconciliation.

Classical inventory systems decrement a stock counter inside a transaction. Under high concurrency — a flash sale, a viral moment, a coordinated drop — those row locks serialize every write and collapse throughput. ClearOPS uses an append-only reservation ledger instead. When a cart is created, a reservation event is appended; when the order is confirmed, a commitment event is appended; when goods are shipped, a fulfil event is appended; when a return is accepted, a restock event is appended. The current available quantity at any location is computed as: on_hand − sum(active reservations) − sum(commitments). This computation runs from an in-memory projection that is updated on every write, never queried from the ledger itself. Reservation events carry a short TTL (configurable, default 30 minutes for guest carts, 4 hours for authenticated carts). An async reconciliation job runs every 30 seconds, expiring stale reservations and unlocking stock. If the reconciler detects that confirmed commitments exceed on-hand (possible only if a goods-receipt shortfall was entered post-commitment), the affected order is moved to an exception queue for staff review — it never silently oversells. Flash-sale mode extends this: a pre-sale reservation gate lets merchandisers pre-commit inventory to a waitlist before the sale window opens, guaranteeing that only customers who received an allocation token can convert.

• Append-only ledger — no row locks, no serialised writes
• In-memory projection for sub-millisecond available-qty reads
• Configurable reservation TTL (guest vs authenticated carts)
• 30-second async reconciliation, exceptions surfaced to staff
• Flash-sale gate with pre-allocation tokens
• Zero oversells demonstrated at 100k RPS in load testing

Group orders into carrier-cutoff waves, optimise travel routes by slot-location map, and let one picker handle multiple orders simultaneously.

ClearOPS WMS wave planning runs on a configurable schedule — typically one wave per carrier cutoff window. Orders are grouped into waves by carrier cutoff time, ship-from zone, and order priority (SLA urgency, loyalty tier, hazmat flag). Within a wave, the system constructs cluster pick lists: instead of one picker walking one order, a single picker carries a multi-order tote and processes all SKUs in a zone before moving. The slot-location map (entered once by warehouse managers, maintained as a structured JSON floorplan) drives travel-distance optimisation: the system calculates the shortest path through the physical aisles that covers all required locations for the cluster, applying a nearest-neighbour heuristic by default with an optional exact-solve mode for small clusters. Pickers work on Android or iOS with the ClearOPS mobile PWA. Each pick is confirmed by scanning the item barcode (GS1 GTIN or internal SKU barcode) against the expected SKU — mismatches halt the pick and surface a resolution workflow. Supervisors see a live wave dashboard: overall progress, picker-by-picker completion rate, exception count, and an estimated on-time percentage for the current cutoff.

• Wave grouping by carrier cutoff, zone, and order priority
• Cluster picking — multiple orders per picker per zone pass
• Slot-location map drives shortest-path travel optimisation
• Scan-to-confirm on Android and iOS (PWA, no MDM required)
• Supervisor live dashboard: progress, exceptions, cutoff risk
• Nearest-neighbour path heuristic, optional exact-solve mode

Accept returns at any store, grade on the spot, trigger refunds immediately — no central DC bottleneck, no days-long customer waits.

The returns journey starts with a QR-authenticated return authorisation. The customer generates a return from their account (or staff creates one from the order timeline); the platform issues a signed QR code valid for the configured return window (default 30 days). Any store equipped with ClearOPS can scan that QR code and accept the return — network-wide, cross-location. Once the QR is scanned, the in-store staff member enters a guided grading workflow on their POS terminal: they inspect each returned item and grade it as Sellable (return directly to shelf), Refurbishable (route to secondary handling), Liquidatable (route to clearance channel), or Discard (write-off, photos attached for the claims record). The refund is triggered at grading completion — not when the item arrives at a central DC. This collapses the customer refund wait from the typical 7–14 days to minutes. Configurable restock rules determine where graded items go: Sellable items can be auto-restocked at the accepting store's inventory, or routed back to a preferred fulfilment node. All return events are appended to the order event ledger, preserving the full lifecycle on one timeline.

• QR return auth — valid cross-network, any store can accept
• Guided grading: Sellable / Refurbishable / Liquidatable / Discard
• Refund triggered at grading, not at central DC receipt
• Configurable restock rules per grade and per category
• Full return event appended to the original order ledger
• Photo capture at grading for insurance and supplier claims

Full chain-of-custody from goods receipt to customer doorstep — lot numbers, serial numbers, and expiry dates enforced at every scan.

ClearOPS captures lot and serial attributes at goods receipt: every GRN line has a mandatory lot number field (or serial number range for serialised SKUs) and an optional expiry date. These attributes flow through every downstream document — putaway, transfer order, pick list, pack slip, and despatch note. At pack-out, the packer scans the GS1 GTIN barcode from the item packaging; ClearOPS resolves the lot from the active reservation and writes the lot/serial into the shipment manifest. This means every shipment has a complete chain of custody from supplier GRN to customer delivery. FEFO (First Expired First Out) is enforced by the wave planner: when multiple lots are available for a SKU, the wave is built such that the soonest-expiring lot is always picked first. Configurable expiry alerts notify category managers when stock is approaching the configured threshold (e.g., 90 days before expiry, 30 days before expiry) so they can run promotional markdowns or initiate supplier credit claims before the stock expires unsold. The audit log for any lot or serial number — every movement, every scan, every document reference — is queryable by lot number and exportable as a CSV for regulatory recall response or supplier audit.

• Lot/serial captured at goods receipt, propagated to all documents
• FEFO enforcement in wave planning — oldest expiry picked first
• GS1 GTIN scan at pack-out writes lot/serial to shipment manifest
• Configurable expiry alerts at category level
• Full chain-of-custody audit log queryable by lot or serial number
• CSV export for recall response within minutes, not days

Direct API connections to six global carriers using your own merchant credentials — no rate markup, real-time rate shopping, unified tracking.

ClearOPS connects directly to UPS, FedEx, DHL Express, USPS, Royal Mail, and Australia Post using the merchant's own carrier account credentials — not a third-party aggregator that marks up rates. This matters: merchants on volume agreements with carriers pay their negotiated rate, not an aggregator's floor. At shipment time, ClearOPS fetches live rates from every eligible carrier for the shipment's weight, dimensions, origin, and destination. The routing engine selects the cheapest carrier that can meet the required SLA. Label generation, tracking number assignment, and manifest submission all happen in the same API call sequence. Tracking events from all carriers are normalised to a unified event schema (carrier-agnostic status codes: ordered, picked_up, in_transit, out_for_delivery, delivered, exception) so customers and ops staff see consistent language regardless of carrier. Tracking webhooks are delivered to merchants with a 99.99% reliability SLA, using a signed-payload retry queue with exponential backoff. When a carrier API is degraded, ClearOPS falls back to the last-known rate and flags the affected shipments for manual rate confirmation — it never silently generates incorrect charges.

• UPS, FedEx, DHL Express, USPS, Royal Mail, AusPost — direct APIs
• Merchant-own credentials — no aggregator rate markup
• Real-time rate shop at shipment time, not cached tables
• Unified tracking event schema across all carriers
• 99.99% webhook delivery with signed payloads and retry queue
• Graceful degradation with carrier API downtime alerts