Customer order fulfillment services remain front and center in the priority list of retail services and capabilities and this will remain for the foreseeable future. The customer is continuously demanding improvements in fulfillment services in support of their changing lifestyles and this has been increasing in velocity of the years and again these changes in demand show no sign of slowing. These points come have been coming together to push the demands for change even earlier in the supply chain to require changes in supply chain logistics to support the fulfilment demands that are coming in quicker and more powerful waves. The supply chain and the partners in the supply chain from fulfillment services, to product and material supplies, to demand forecast and planning are all coming together now in the extended collaborative network to optimize fulfillment services.
According to Wikipedia ‘in a general business sense, logistics is the management of the flow of things between the point of origin and the point of consumption in order to meet requirements of customers or corporations’. Based on this definition, fulfillment is a piece of the logistics chain and benefits from the improvements to the entire chain. This is important to understand the interactions and dependencies across the entire extended supply chain in order to understand both the demands on the entire supply chain and also the dependencies and interactions required to support the demands in any function within the supply chain. Based on these demands and the relationships across supply chain you can see the importance of the network and the importance of the means and the methods to communication across the entire supply chain in order to optimize the fulfillment services within the network.
Communication and collaboration requirements have increased dramatically and will remain a key requirement to the continued support of the changes across the supply chain. This requires a control tower network and process that allows the supply chain partners to plug in and provide integration and communication tools through the entire supply chain to reduce the cost and effort for new partners to participate and support new services and products across the entire supply chain. The retail extended supply chain cannot afford to continue in a command and control practice and procedures and must transition to collaborative practice a procedures in order to effectively support the demands with the velocity that the changes demand.
The extended supply chain partners are in a position now to support the changing demands to improve the end fulfillment of goods and services. The network partners are in place now with the goods and services to optimize the fulfillment and not only that but to also to provide the framework to support the changing demands. The focus now for the extended supply chain should be implementing the control tower communication and collaboration capabilities to support the collaborative interaction required to create the supply chain collaborative network. I believe we will begin to see an increase in discussions and topics focused on this control tower communication and collaboration tools and capabilities to support the optimization not only in fulfillment services but probably more importantly in the entire extended logistics supply chain.
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