What Is Supply Chain Fulfillment? Process & Systems
Quick answer: Supply chain fulfillment is the process of meeting customer orders across the whole supply chain — planning, procurement, production, warehousing, delivery and returns — so the right product reaches the right customer on time. For online stores, the warehousing and shipping steps are often outsourced to a 3PL, and order management (OMS) and warehouse management (WMS) systems keep the process fast and accurate. In this article, you will learn the meaning and the process of supply chain fulfillment, the basics of supply chain management, and ways to improve order fulfillment in supply chain management.
What is Supply Chain Fulfillment?
A supply chain is the network built around a core company that connects suppliers, manufacturers, distributors, retailers and end users. By controlling the flow of information, goods and money, it takes products from the procurement of raw materials, through intermediate and finished products, to the consumer’s hands through the sales network. Supply chain fulfillment is how this network actually meets each customer order.
What is the Process of Supply Chain Fulfillment?
Planning: engaged in the pre-planning process of various supply chain activities.
Procurement: Procurement activities to meet business objectives are based on the dismantling and implementation of procurement plans.
3PL service: At Honest FulPhilment, we provide 3PL services. 3PL is the outsourcing of supply chain operations and logistics to get a company’s products to customers. Logistics solutions provided by 3PL include reception, storage, packaging, and transportation services. With our own warehouse in China and 18+ overseas 3PL warehouses, we can ship goods from the most suitable warehouse for your customers’ location to keep delivery times short.
Production and manufacturing: the production activities carried out to fulfill customer contracts, which can be divided into make-to-stock and make-to-order production.
Delivery: the upstream supplier of the supply chain delivers the product to the downstream customer.
Return/recovery: the reverse process of returning the product from the downstream customer to the upstream supplier, such as return and refund, C2B recovery.
What is Supply Chain Management?
The business philosophy of supply chain management is to seek the overall optimization of the supply chain through the cooperation between enterprises from the perspective of consumers. Successful supply chain management can coordinate and integrate all the activities in the supply chain, and eventually become a seamless integration process.
Supply chain management is the use of a series of efficient methods to integrate suppliers, manufacturers, carriers, and distributors so that products can be produced in the right quantities and delivered to the right place at the right time, with the goal of minimizing overall system costs at a satisfactory level of service to customers.
Key Features of Effective Supply Chain Management
The management idea of “horizontal integration”.
Non-core businesses are outsourced to business partners to form strategic alliances with business partners.
There is cooperative competition among supply chain enterprises.
Customer satisfaction is the goal of service-oriented management.
Supply chains pursue the integration of logistics, information flow, capital flow, workflow, and organizational flow.
With the help of information technology to achieve management objectives.
Pay more attention to the participation of logistics enterprises.
How to Improve Order Fulfillment in Supply Chain Management?
The ways to improve order fulfillment in supply chain management are as follows:
OMS
Order Management system (OMS) is a part of the logistics management system. By managing and tracking orders from customers, OMS dynamically grasps the progress and completion of orders, improves operational efficiency in the logistics process, saves operation time and cost, and improves the market competitiveness of logistics enterprises.
The main function of the order management system is to provide users with integrated one-stop supply chain services through unified orders. Order management and order tracking management can provide users with logistics services to meet the whole process. The order management system is an indispensable part of the logistics management chain, through the order management and distribution, warehouse management, and transportation management organic union, stable effective logistics management in each link, gives full play to the role, the warehousing, transportation, order as an organic whole, meet the needs of logistics information system.
WMS
The warehouse management system is through the warehousing business, outbound business, warehouses, allocating and virtual warehouse inventory management, and other functions, comprehensive, material corresponding, stock batch management, quality management, virtual warehouse management, and just-in-time inventory management functions such as the integrated use of management system, effective control and follow up warehouse logistics and whole process cost management of the business, to achieve perfect enterprise storage and information management. The system can independently execute inventory operations, and other systems of documents and vouchers combined with use can provide a more complete and comprehensive business process and financial management information.
Conclusion
If you want to know more about supply chain fulfillment, I hope that you will contact us–Honest FulPhilment. We will provide comprehensive services to you.
FAQ
What is supply chain fulfillment?
Supply chain fulfillment is the part of the supply chain that turns customer orders into delivered products: sourcing and producing the goods, storing them, picking and packing orders, shipping them and handling returns. It links suppliers, manufacturers, warehouses, carriers and customers.
Is fulfillment part of the supply chain?
Yes. Order fulfillment is the downstream end of the supply chain, where inventory is turned into shipped orders. Its speed and accuracy depend on how well the earlier stages, such as planning and procurement, are managed.
What are the stages of supply chain fulfillment?
The usual stages are planning, procurement, production, warehousing and fulfillment (often handled by a 3PL), delivery to the customer, and returns or recovery.
What systems are used to improve supply chain fulfillment?
The two core systems are an order management system (OMS), which tracks every order from purchase to delivery, and a warehouse management system (WMS), which controls inventory, picking and shipping inside the warehouse. Connecting them to your store automates the whole flow.