Fulfillment Problems - Kinds Of Fulfillment Problems

KINDS OF FULFILLMENT PROBLEMS

Most fulfillment problems stem from companies not being able to make good on promises of product availability and fast shipping as made in their advertisements. While accepting orders is quite simple, filling them quickly and efficiently is another matter. Among the factors that cause problems are a lack of real-time connectivity and integration, poor planning or forecasting, and trouble with warehouse operations.

Lack of real-time connectivity—either between businesses and consumers or businesses and other businesses—is a primary cause of fulfillment problems. Generally speaking, e-commerce happens very quickly. The amount of time that elapses between the sales transaction process and when a product is actually shipped can literally be a matter of minutes. To achieve this high rate of speed, a company's Web site must be integrated with its other back-end systems, such as accounting or inventory, and the information must be made available to all trading partners. This creates confidence in the fulfillment system and allows potential problems to be identified before they develop into actual ones.

Providing shipping and order confirmations, notices about problems, and up-to-the-minute details in real-time is critical to an e-tailer's success. As explained in World Trade,—Today's customers want to know a lot about their order: whether it's in stock, when it was shipped, where it is, and how soon they'll get it. Statistics say that Internet customers typically check on their order seven times before they receive it.

When a company's Web site isn't integrated with its other systems, orders may come in via the World Wide Web and sit for days or weeks until they are manually re-entered by someone into another system. Not only does this cause fulfillment to move at a very slow pace, it also makes it difficult for companies to monitor the status of their operations and introduces the opportunity for human error. Product codes, prices, shipping addresses and more can be accidentally altered during manual re-entry.

Whether fulfillment occurs between businesses and individual consumers or businesses and other businesses, effective fulfillment systems are built from the inside out, instead of from the outside in. What this means is that they need to be flexible enough to work with and accept data in various formats from computer systems at other organizations. In the world of e-commerce, companies frequently change relationships with other manufacturers, suppliers, and distributors. Having a fulfillment system that can accommodate different trading partners, no matter what system they use, is attractive because it reduces the need for making special arrangements.

Poor forecasting and planning also creates problems in the fulfillment process. Forecasting involves using information from a variety of different sources to predict business fluctuations, sometimes with the use of special software programs. When this isn't done, companies lose their ability to deliver goods or services on-time due to embarrassing inventory shortages, inadequate warehouse staffing, and so on. Besides forecasting consumer demand for their own products and services, companies also may need to consider production forecasts from suppliers they rely on during the manufacturing process.

Finally, because of the need for constant, real-time information about the status of products and shipments, modern warehouses are a requirement for successful e-tailers. When warehouses are operated under manual systems, inefficiencies and mistakes often occur, such as shipping items to the wrong address and long delays. In the early 2000s, companies relied on warehouse management software (WMS), overhead scanners, conveyor belt systems, wireless computer networks, wearable computers, hand-held bar code scanners and portable printers to streamline operations and automate the movement of goods through their warehouses. The way such technologies were used was complex and varied depending on the warehouse or distribution center. However, in general they eliminated the need for human involvement for tasks like checking incoming shipments against paper purchase orders and figuring out where incoming shipments need to go in a warehouse (to inventory or to another dock for immediate delivery).