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Article:
Logistics or Fulfillment
What do
military logistics and retail fulfillment
have in common? Everything! Place an order
for a few hundred tanks and relevant bit’s
and pieces; tell them when and where you
want them delivered; they are paid;
logistics kicks in and they are delivered.
We all know that as military supply lines.
The private sector knows logistics as
fulfillment under the guise of
‘Transportation and Inventory Management’ or
‘Physical Distribution Management’ and
‘Supply Chain Management’.
Now
logistics/fulfillment can be a competitive
weapon both for an army and heightened by
the Web, some argue that fulfillment is the
ultimate hurdle between winners and losers
in a retail environment. In fact, customers
using the Web indicate that fulfillment
issues such as inventory availability and
on-time delivery are the most important
aspects of their e-commerce experience.
E-commerce
has brought a heightened level of focus to
customer satisfaction and delivery
fulfillment. And the new technology has
business moving nearly at the speed of
light. But all that flash and glamour is
tarnished if the basic fundamentals aren’t
properly designed and managed. In that
respect, the day-to-day job of superior
supply chain logistics execution is just as
important as ever. The key difference today
is that visibility across the supply chain,
for the first time, can and must become
crystal clear if the desired level of
customer enthusiasm is to be achieved.
The biggest
trend in the logistics industry is the
movement of information in tandem with goods
and services. In today’s e-business
environment moving products is only 50
percent of your job. You must also be able
to move information and provide customers
with real-time, 24-hour access to the status
of their shipments. In essence you must
offer customers complete visibility to their
supply chain from the factory through
transportation to delivery.
Your
E-commerce customers want instant answers to
three basic questions. Where is their order;
can they change their order and when will it
ship? Providing instant response via the
Internet is essential to success because
people don’t buy products, they buy
delivered products.
A full-cycle
system that integrates an advanced
e-commerce front-end with a powerful order
fulfillment back-end allows your ecommerce
website to attract and retain customers
through order fulfillment precision and will
enable you to both capture orders and commit
inventory to fulfill those orders through
real-time access to accurate
available-to-promise information.
That is why
it is essential to tie your e-commerce
operation to a logistics network, either
yours or outsource to a fulfillment house.
As you grow,
establishing a fast and accurate
logistics/fulfillment center is a key to
your continued expansion, yet badly managed
it can be disastrous. In fact to avoid
fulfillment issues and problems many e-tailers
are outsourcing their fulfillment operations
and management to third party logistics
companies.
As successful
military leaders know, advancing beyond the
capability of supply lines can stop an army
dead in its tracks. What will it do to your
e-commerce? -
John Shenton -
January, 2003
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