Supply Chains: A Manager's Guide

Accelerating Fulfillment

In light of all the operations necessary to fill an order, it should come as no surprise that so many companies have trouble with fulfillment. Many of the practices, including the ritual exchange of similar but slightly different documents at each stage, date back to the early days of commerce. On top of this traditional foundation, many complications have been constructed in the name of improved sales and customer service, including tiered pricing, quantity discounts, revolving credit, special terms, custom configuration, and specialized packaging. The result is a complex process that takes a long time to carry out, incurs a great deal of expense, and provides lots of opportunity for errors.

These problems tend to frustrate ...