Integration and Analytics in Supply Chain

Order fulfillment is in the most general sense the complete process from point of sale inquiry to delivery of a product to the customer.

Enterprises need to monitor carefully process indicators in order to achieve perfect order fulfillment and satisfy their customers.

Appropriate order fulfillment monitoring should provide real-time tracking of items from when customers send requests until delivery and receipt acknowledgement of products. A kind of cockpit dashboard accessible via simple web click, that permanently show stuck orders, monthly activity, and status of processed orders.

It should also provide pro-active monitoring to avoid missing SLA and accelerate problem resolution.

You ought to consider seriously re-assessing your order fulfillment process infrastructure if you identify with any of the following:

Involved Key Players	Potential Pain(s)
COO	•       Brand loyalty loss (Loss of revenues; Customer shift to competition)
CSCO	•       High operational costs
VP Supply Chain	•       In Make to Stock situation, too many out of stocks incurring high costs of maintaining safety stocks •       In Make to Order situation, too many deviations in order lead time and accuracy •       Inability to track the full procure-to-pay process •       Often in firefighting mode due to late reaction on exceptions. •       Relations with suppliers often in ‘blaming’ mode without facts & figures. •       Not meeting customer’s SLA requirements/Customer commitments: Goods delivery time and accuracy
VP Sales/Customer Service	•       Inability to respond in an accurate and timely manner to customer’s request “where is my order” •       High resource cost due to cumbersome methods for remediating transaction issues
CIO/ VP of IT Operations	•       Difficulty reconciling order IDs across process steps •       Impacted by SC frequent crisis situations •       Inability to provide Line of Business with the appropriate analytical tools

Deviations in orders lead-time and accuracy put pressure on VP Sales/Customer Service as they deal with unhappy customer complaints and crises.

Brand image damage put additional pressure on VP Sales/Customer Service as revenue will decrease. Unhappy customers will go to the competition and they will not be able to attract new customers

If these issues are not remedied, the impact on your organization can be considerable:

• Missed deadlines for shipping
• Inability to mitigate customer impact in advance
• Lower perfect order fulfillment rates
• Alerts cannot  be sent in real time, and incidents cannot be avoided
• Impact to customers and business resulting from inability to proactively identify and resolve unusual/abnormal situations that put deadlines and accuracy at risk.
• Revenue decrease.
• Unhappy customers turning to competition
• Penalties on missed SLAs
• Inability to give customers order status in real-time
• Lack of agility to supply multiple channels

You should consider the following capabilities when looking for a solution:

• Transitions your organization from reactive to proactive to ensure smooth operations with no surprises?
• Anticipates risks of not meeting shipping and delivery commitments, and not simply detects them afterwards?
• Learns from past performance and alerts when deviation from pattern occurs?
• Helps identifying bottlenecks in the process so that you can optimize and fine tune performance?
• Tracks and follows the order fulfillment process across the multiple application silos, and give real time status on it.
• Provides you with a single pane that shows immediately the order status, and highlights those in an alert situation
• Provides adequate connectivity and view on data across multiple ERPs and applications in order to learn from past performance and patterns?
• Learns the expected behavior from all data across all systems and files, and warns in advance of anomalies that can impact staffing requirements?
• Anticipates risks of not meeting shipping and delivery commitments, and not simply detects them afterwards?
• Transitions your organization from reactive to proactive to ensure smooth operations with no surprises?

Implementing a proper order fulfillment monitoring will have positive impact on the business:

• Reduced SLA penalties and chargebacks
• Better control and optimization of process from order acquisition to manufacturing and then to delivery
• Improved relations with customers
• Stronger high quality brand that can face cheaper competition