Fulfillment
Fulfillment means all process to fulfill demand of an internal party or a customer party! Demand is created by internal orders or customer orders.
Filling demand can be broken down into two tasks/questions:
- Disposition task - Where to get the goods from?
- Deliery task - How to get the goods to the place of demand?
Where to get the goods from?
Whenever demand exists, disposition has three choices to get the goods demanded:
- Have - Fill the demand from intra-organization stock. Eventually wait for outstanding production or purchase orders bound to intra-organization stock as expected shipments.
- Buy - Purchase the goods with a supplier/vendor through creation of a purchase order
- Make - Produce the required goos
How to get the goods to the place of demand?
Once it is clear where and when the goods are available the next issue is to deliver them to the place of demand of the internal or external customer. Generally there are these options:
- IntraOrg pickup - Pickup by customer at intra-organization pickup station
- 3rd party pickup - Pickup by customer at 3rd party pickup station
- Postal delivery - Direct delivery to a postal address
- IntraOrg delivery - Direct delivery to a company mail address - this option is only available for intra-organization demand
Internal Fulfillment
From a retailer`s perspective this means the activities performed once an order is received to fulfill the order: packaging, distribution and shipping of goods. From a logistic provider`s perspective it is the packaging and dispatching of a customer`s order. The digital which needs to fulfill typically promises certain goods by accepting an order - typically an internal order, customer order, return order or relocation order.
ZUGSEIL supports fulfillment of two fulfillment handling types: implicit fulfillment handling and explicit fulfillment handling. For most scenarios implicit fulfillment handling is fully sufficient - but especially when collaboration with 3rd parties is required implicit fulfillment has its limitations.
Implicit Fulfillment Handling
Implicit fulfillment happens demand-driven and without scheduling. Its primary driver are shipment orders, which trigger local fulfillment actions:
- Picking Process - When a demand is risen against a warehouse by a shipment order and free quantity is on stock. The picking process takes quantity from the local stock
- In-Process-Services (optional) - These are services, which are performed to the items to be fulfilled directly as part of the picking process before dispatching starts.
- Dispatching of picked goods - This item takes picked (and eventually serviced) goods and sends them out by using a logistic provider to the final destination.
If shipping orders can not be fulfilled, procurement processes are triggered in the local digital for acquiring the missing goods.
Explicit Supply Chain Handling
With supply chains becoming more and more complex, fulfillment tasks also gained complexity through being distributed over multiple steps before the final customer is reached. To address this ZUGSEIL has introduced fulfillment collaboration capabilities which work well in simple as well as the most complex supply chain scenarios spanning over multiple identities. In essence, a fulfillment plan is built and communicated to other stakeholder of the fullfillment which is describes each planned step along the fulfillment of the goods. To address this ZUGSEIL has introduced innovative fulfillment supply chain capabilities which works well in simple as well as the most complex supply chain scenarios spanning over multiple identities collaborating to fulfill the promise given to the customer.
Examples for scenarios driving fulfillment supply chain complexity are :
- customization of goods (internal or by 3rd party)
- finishing of goods (internal or by 3rd party)
- assembly tasks along the fulfillment supply chain