Evaluating the Performance of Order Fulfillment Process in Supply Chain

Abstract

Supply chain management has become a major component of competitive strategy to enhance organizational productivity and profitability. It is stated that supply chain performance measurement is so important in developing supply chain. Performance measurement has a substantial role to play in setting objectives, evaluating performance, and determining future courses of actions. The order fulfillment process specifies the particular steps regarding the flow of the customer orders through supply chain and how customer orders are: generated, entered, processed, manufactured, documented, picked, delivered and handled post-delivery, so it is considered the prime process to integrate and manage supply chain. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the performance of order fulfillment process through a developed measurement framework. A review of the current understanding of supply chain management and literature related to supply chain performance measurement is performed. The measurement framework is divided into two categories of measures that evaluate the performance of order fulfillment activities and the accuracy of the delivered orders respectively. Each category's measures are weighted by making a survey through a distributed questionnaire. Objectives Matrix tool is applied to each category to obtain an overall performance index for each category. A case study is made at a leading textile company in Egypt. The results are two performance indices for order fulfillment; the first one indicates the order fulfillment activities performance and the other indicates the delivered orders accuracy as the main intent of order fulfillment process.