ORIGINAL COMPANY-CONTEXT PRACTICE
Offer delivery slots for orders with bulky products
Original practice scenario: A hypothetical home-improvement delivery service must consider vehicle volume, weight and handling capability when offering slots. Design reservation and rescheduling behavior.
Written for independent practice using company context; this is not a verified question from a company interview.
A REASONED APPROACH
Model answer.
Represent delivery capacity as multiple constrained resources rather than a count of orders. Two orders can have very different vehicle and handling requirements even when each has one item.
Work through it
- Create a versioned delivery demand from item dimensions, weight, handling flags and destination constraints, distinguishing unknown product data from zero requirements.
- Reserve the required resources atomically or through a recoverable hold protocol, expiring abandoned choices and recalculating when the order changes.
- Reconcile route assignment with the promised slot, exposing infeasible changes for customer choice instead of silently overbooking capacity.
Tradeoffs to discuss
- Detailed capacity models improve feasibility but depend on accurate catalog data; conservative allowances reduce utilization while limiting failed deliveries.
Common pitfalls
- An accepted payment does not prove a suitable vehicle or handling team is available.
- A reschedule must release or supersede the old capacity reservation exactly once.