Optimizing telecom supply chain operations on AWS with Amazon Multi Channel Fulfillment

Telecom and communication service providers (CSPs) across the globe face challenges in meeting customer expectations for product availability and fast delivery. These difficulties primarily arise from two issues: inconsistent inventory, and the pressure to reliably deliver products with the same day delivery option. As consumers increasingly expect immediate access to products, any delay or unavailability leads to frustration, prompting them to switch to competitors. This dissatisfaction results in lost sales, diminished brand loyalty, and a potential decline in customer base. Industry statistics highlight the gravity of this challenge—63% of consumers expect to receive their items within two days or less and will switch retailers if their expectations are not met. In a digital age where negative experiences can quickly gain traction online, telcos must prioritize resolving these delivery and availability issues to stay competitive, retain customer trust, and safeguard their brand image. Moreover, the impact of these issues extends beyond the CSPs themselves, placing their delivery partners at risk of losing valuable business. The key to overcoming this challenge lies in transforming supply chain management to provide reliable inventory and prompt delivery that align with the high expectations of today’s consumers.

Solution

The Amazon supply chain network offers a fully automated suite of services designed to move products efficiently from suppliers and manufacturers to customers worldwide. One key component of these services is Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF), a third-party logistics (3PL) solution that streamlines fulfillment operations for businesses. Amazon MCF enables companies and their technology partners to tap into the extensive fulfillment network of Amazon, using its capabilities to pick, pack, ship, and deliver orders across various sales channels. Amazon strategically distributes inventory throughout its network to position products for faster delivery. This increases the availability of same-day and next-day shipping options. This improved efficiency typically results in a 20% increase in unit sales for both B2B and B2C operations.

For telecom companies with existing e-commerce platforms and Order Management Systems (OMS), Amazon Multi-Channel Fulfillment (MCF) simplifies integration through connectors for popular platforms. These include Amazon’s native apps and third-party solutions like WebBee’s Amazon MCF connector, Pipe17, and ShipStation. By adopting Amazon MCF, telecom companies gain improved visibility, streamlined operations, and a better customer experience through consistent product availability. Amazon’s MCF combined with AWS cloud services can bring a revolution to telecom supply chains by reducing shrinkage (Revenue loss from theft), ensuring consistent product availability across all channels, and optimizing inventory management. With Amazon’s global reach, the integration of Multi-Channel Fulfillment & AWS Cloud technology accelerates processes, reduces errors, and boosts operational efficiency—ultimately leading to cost savings, greater customer satisfaction, and improved customer lifetime value.

From a technology standpoint, Amazon MCF offers ready-to-use APIs that provide on-demand access to key information such as inventory levels, order status, and inbound shipment tracking. However, telcos are seeking more integrated solutions. Specifically, they need the following:

1. A fully automated fulfillment operations that can seamlessly connect Amazon MCF with their back-end IT systems to streamline the entire order fulfillment process.

2. Proactive visibility into both business and technical KPIs. In turn, they can monitor the inventory health and the overall performance of their supply chain operations within the Amazon fulfillment centers.

The following solution addresses these requirements while integrating Amazon MCF with telecom backend endpoints. It’s implemented using a serverless, microservices-driven architecture with the core logic implemented in Amazon Web Services (AWS) Lambda functions and data storage in Amazon DynamoDB and Amazon Aurora.

High level solution architecture

At a high level, the solution addresses two key use cases

1. Tracking solution to streamline order fulfillment process: Track Amazon MCF shipments, orders, packages, and inventory adjustments and deliver custom payloads to tracking endpoints.

2. Supply chain fulfillment dashboard to monitor health of supply chain operations inside of Amazon MCF: Visualize fulfillment metrics on a live analytics dashboard.

Figure 1: High level architecture

1. Tracking solution

The core of this Amazon MCF tracking system is an integration layer that connects Amazon MCF APIs/push notifications with fulfillment tracking API endpoints. For the sake of compatibility, you must identify a mapping between Amazon MCF fields from various API response bodies and your tracking endpoint fields. This field mapping serves as the foundation for all four workflows in the following solution, thus generating accurate data translation between systems.

The integration layer acts as a bridge, translating the Amazon data structures into formats compatible with your existing systems, as shown in the following figure.

Figure 2: AWS Integration Solution for Amazon MCF

The solution uses several AWS services to create a scalable and reliable system for different Amazon MCF tracking activities, such as order status, package, inbound shipping and inventory tracking. We can examine the core components and their interactions:

1. Amazon EventBridge: Triggers workflows at configured intervals
2. Lambda functions – Four primary Lambda functions handle different aspects of the fulfillment process:

a. Order status processor: Handles Amazon MCF outbound order notifications

b. Package tracking: Updates package statuses

c. Inbound shipment tracker: Monitors shipments to fulfillment centers

d. Inventory adjustment handler: Processes inventory reports

3. Amazon DynamoDB tables

a. Package tracking table: Stores current package statuses

b. Inbound shipments table: Maintains shipment records

4. Amazon Simple Queue Service (Amazon SQS): Outbound order notification queues for reliable message delivery

a. Includes dead-letter queues for failed message handling

b. Supports private delivery through VPC endpoints

5. AWS Secrets Manager: Secure storage for API credentials

6. AWS Systems Manager Parameter Store: Stores nonsensitive values

This solution comprises four main workflows with Amazon MCF. The order status notification workflow handles real-time updates published by Amazon MCF to track fulfillment progress. The package tracking workflow monitors shipment status updates at regular, configurable intervals. The inbound shipment workflow tracks shipments to Amazon fulfillment centers at regular, configurable intervals. Finally, the inventory adjustment workflow monitors inventory changes (broken or lost in fulfillment centers) at regular, configurable intervals.

Order status notifications

1. Amazon MCF publishes order status updates to Amazon SQS
2. A Lambda processor receives notifications and queries getFulfillmentOrder Amazon MCF API to retrieve order details
3. Detailed updates are created and sent to the customer’s outbound order tracking endpoint
4. Packages are logged in a DynamoDB package tracking table for each order

Package tracking

1. EventBridge triggers a Lambda function every 15 minutes
2. A Lambda function scans the DynamoDB package tracking table for packages with a non-terminal status
3. For each package, call getPackageTrackingDetails Amazon MCF API to retrieve latest package details
4. If the package status or tracking events have changed, then it sends the update to the customer’s package tracking endpoint
5. Update package statuses in DynamoDB

Inbound shipment tracking

1. An hourly EventBridge trigger initiates a scan by a Lambda function
2. Call Amazon MCF getShipments API with lastScannedTime parameter to retrieve shipments updated since the last scan time
3. For each shipment, compare with the DynamoDB records to calculate inventory deltas
4. Sends updates to the customer shipment tracking endpoint
5. Updates DynamoDB records

Inventory adjustments

1. Runs every hour through EventBridge to trigger a Lambda function
2. Initiates inventory report creation against the Amazon MCF API
3. Retrieves and processes report document
4. Delivers adjustment updates to the customer inventory adjustment tracking endpoint

The architecture follows AWS Well-Architected best practices, incorporating Dead Letter Queues (DLQ) and custom retry logic for resilient error handling. This is done while using the inherent scalability of serverless components. Comprehensive monitoring through Amazon CloudWatch and Amazon Simple Notification Service (Amazon SNS)-based alerting generates operational visibility and rapid incident response, thus maintaining robust system health across all workflows.

2. Supply chain fulfillment dashboard

Visibility into fulfillment operations is crucial for maintaining customer satisfaction and managing costs effectively. The Amazon MCF Analytics Dashboard addresses this need by providing real-time insights into your fulfillment operations through an automated data collection and visualization solution. The system automatically retrieves data from Amazon MCF APIs on a scheduled basis, storing it in a structured database that powers interactive dashboards. Businesses can use this to optimize inventory levels, track fulfillment performance, monitor shipping efficiency, and make data-driven decisions without the overhead of manual data collection and analysis.

The solution follows a serverless architecture pattern with these key components, as shown in the following figure:

Figure 3: Supply chain fulfillment dashboard architecture

Data collection layer

• Lambda functions run on a scheduled basis through EventBridge
• Lambda functions make authenticated calls to Amazon MCF APIs
• VPC endpoints generate secure API communication
• Secrets Manager handles sensitive credentials

Data storage layer

• Amazon Aurora for MySQL database stores structured data
• Seven normalized tables capture different aspects of fulfillment operations
• A relational model maintains referential integrity between related entities

Visualization layer

• Amazon QuickSight connects directly to Aurora MySQL
• Custom dashboards provide interactive visualizations
• Users access insights through the QuickSight interface

This automated analytics solution transforms complex fulfillment data into actionable insights. Therefore, you can optimize inventory management, improve delivery performance, and make data-driven decisions across your Amazon MCF operations.

Conclusion

Telcos can use the integration layer described in this post to get a solution fully integrated with Amazon MCF that creates on-demand access to key information such as inventory levels, order status, and inbound shipment tracking. Telcos can also generate continuous efficiencies into their supply chain operation by getting detailed insights into their fulfillment operations through an automated data collection and visualization solution build in the Amazon MCF Analytics Dashboard explained in this post.