Fulfillment
In the context of supply chain management, "fulfillment" refers to the process of delivering products or services to customers after receiving and processing an order. It encompasses all the activities and functions involved in ensuring that a customer's order is successfully completed and delivered to their satisfaction. Fulfillment is a crucial aspect of the supply chain because it directly impacts customer satisfaction and can significantly influence a company's reputation and success.
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, each participant communicatea with other stakeholders of the fullfillment job.
Examples for scenarios driving fulfillment supply chain complexity are
- multi level supply chains
- customization of goods along the supply chain
- distributed assembly tasks along the fulfillment supply chain
- amongst many more ...
The trigger for fulfilmment action is always a demand. Demand is defined through internal orders, customer orders or production orders. The internal or external customer defines through them, which goods should be where in which state, when amongst a lot of other information.
Processing of demand
With these information available, fulfillment means all processes to fulfill this exact demand, which is always connected with these questions:
Where to get the goods from?
This question aims for the commonly know task of disposition. Whenever demand exists, disposition has three choices to get the goods demanded:
- Have - Fill the demand from local warehouses. Eventually wait for outstanding production or purchase orders bound to intra-organization stock. Inbound stock is bound to expected deliveries.
- Buy - Purchase the goods with a supplier/vendor through creation of a purchase order with a supplier.
- Make - Produce the required goods through a production order or through product customization.
How to get the goods into the desired state?
This optional question aims towards customization of products according to to the demand of the customers. Typically this demand is filled by:
- In-Process-Services - These are typically simple services, which are performed to the items to be fulfilled directly as part of or right after the picking process, before delivery process starts.
- Explicit supply chain handling - When the desired state cannot be created as part of the picking process, other external parties or production must be involved.
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 delivery options:
- Postal - requires a shipment address defined at the order
- Pickup - requires a pickup station defined at the order. Each pickup station must have a shipment address gateway defined for external parties delivering there.
- Internal Logistic System - requires a comail-address (typically a orgunit-code) defined at the order. Each internal logistic system must have a shipment address gateway defined.