Fulfillment
In the context of supply chain management, "fulfillment" refers to the process of delivering products or services to customers after demand has been defined. Fulfillment 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 basic fulfllment scenarios are
- demand, which is directly filled from local stock
- regular demand resulting in purchasing with a supplier
- demand, which is forwarded to a supplier with direct delivery to the internal customer
- demand, which is forwarded to a supplier with indirect delivery over a local warehouse to the internal customer
Additional challenges 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
- dependency on production
Related articles
Demand creation & definition
The trigger for fulfillment action is always a demand. With ZUGSEIL, demand is created through internal orders, customer orders or production orders.
Demand of customer and internal orders
Each order typically contains information required for propper fulfillment. Covered details are:
- Ordered products or services - Which goods should delivered? Which state they should be delivered?
- Delivery details - How are the items shipped? Where and when should these goods be handed over to the customer
- Other information - There can be many more relevant information to fulfillment, like international commercial terms (INCOTERMS), which clarify the obligations of buyers and sellers in foreign trade contract
Demand of production orders
Each production order creates internal demand for production ingredients, machines and human resources to be available when required by the production plan. The production plan has to become defined after the production order was placed and accepted. Once the plan is accepted one outcome is material demand, which is expressed over internal orders.
Fulfillment processes
Related articles
- Collaborative supply chain management
- Order types - Internal order, Customer Order, Purchase order, Production order
- Fulfillment entities - Holds a list of entities relevant to fulfillment
- Delivery option
- Delivery & Expected Delivery
- Warehouse Management System