How to align the Delivery Process in a critical part in Supply Chain – steps | implement | model
How to align the Delivery Process in a critical part in Supply Chain
No matter how good they are the things you make don’t have any real value until they get to a customer. So the fourth set of processes in the SCOR Model focus on delivering products and services. The deliver processes fall into three main categories, order management, transportation and distribution.
Order management includes the processes you use to take orders from a customer. These could be the processes for a check out lane in a grocery store, the drive through lane in a restaurant, or an e-commerce website. Whatever business you’re in, order management is about customers deciding to buy something from you and you making the commitment to deliver it. The next set of delivery processes occur in warehouses or distribution centers, receiving products, putting them away, picking them, packing them and shipping them off to the next step in a supply chain. For example you might ship products to a retail store or to your final customer. And that brings us to the third set of deliver processes, transportation. Trucks, trains, and airplanes are all examples of different modes of transportation.
In order to choose the right mode for a shipment you need information about the product, information about the customer, and information about where it’s being shipped from and to. Companies rarely handle all of their order management, transportation, and distribution alone. The firms they hire to help are called third party logistics providers, or 3PLs. And sometimes they hire brokers, called 4PLs, to manage the 3PLs. The deliver process starts when you receive a customer order and it ends when the product is delivered. So if you think about it, the very best metric for all of the processes from order to delivery is the percentage of perfect orders. In other words what’s the percentage of orders where your customers get the right products delivered to the right place for the right price at the right time and in the right condition.
Your deliver processes are the last link in the supply chain between your company and your customers. So aligning the processes you use to manage orders, distribution and transportation is a critical part of implementing supply chain management successfully. When you see the results in terms of a high perfect order score then you’ll know that you’re really delivering on the commitments that you and your company are making to your customers.