competency 1 assessment
Step 1: Process Evaluation
One of the crucial services that Shopify provide to its merchants and vendors is order fulfillment. This process is necessary, particularly where these stakeholders are incapable of effectively executing this process on their own (Shopify, 2022). One of the key processes of performing this activity is order consolidation and shipment, where the organization will aid its merchant(s) fill large orders by consolidating all the available inventory into a single order fulfillment center and then dispatching it to its intended origin/consumer. This process can be tedious for Shopify, especially given that most vendors are new at running their organizations (United States Securities Exchange Commission, 2021). As such, the firm encounters various challenges that may lead to potential errors or defects in its order consolidation process. Thus, driven by the need to further understand the challenges that affect the process within Shopify, the assessment sought data from one of the company’s employees.
Upon acquiring the data, I used a control chart, and a select intervention, namely the Pareto analysis, to further understand the key causes of the errors experienced, and help this organization establish the appropriate solutions/remedies to the problem. As such, this paper focuses on improving Shopify’s order consolidation process to enable customers to combine more than one order. The limitation was that every order on the platform has a specific order number that defines it, and consolidating them would mix internal data and reference details. Therefore, Shopify customers had to work around the challenges. However, the improvement procedure involves developing a dashboard with the following tabs; Orders (available), Draft Orders and Create Order. This platform will allow customers to consolidate their purchases.
Step 2: Evaluation of Control Chart and Process Metrics
The evaluation of this process was guided by a control chart and the process metrics. First, the data captured provided the number of incorrect products per the consolidated orders from 15th to 21st May 2022. Second, the order consolidation process for the sampled shipment provides detailed information regarding the number of correct and incorrect orders. Third, the order timeline provides information on the time it took customers to process particular orders. Thus, the analysis includes the total number of processed orders in the 7-day period. Below is the table summary of the correct and incorrect consolidated orders from May 15 to 21, 2022.
| Days | 15th | 16th | 17th | 18th | 19th | 20th | 21st | Total |
| Correct Consolidated Orders | 227 | 213 | 199 | 223 | 248 | 175 | 215 | 1500 |
| Incorrect Consolidated Orders | 22 | 25 | 18 | 29 | 20 | 17 | 19 | 150 |
Table 1: 7-day data on the number of correct and incorrect orders as per the consolidation.
From the above data, it was possible to establish the key process controls for this period, such as the lower and upper limits of the number of correct and incorrect products.
Figure 1: 7-day data on the number of correct and incorrect products per the consolidation.
The provided data source also contained further information concerning the sources of order consolidation errors and defects, which enables a further evaluation of this process. For instance, from the data set, five causes of order consolidation were identified and the specific number of defects attributed to each was also provided.
