Customer fulfillment

However, supply chain processes like product development, launching new products, and customer fulfillment are horizontal processes. The collaboration required makes it difficult to write a process-oriented substrategy for the business unit. A fresh challenge arises in pushing those horizontal processes outside the company, like one must do for the supply chain. 

Intermediate-term roles and responsibilities, often defined as monthly, quarterly, or yearly, involve production planning and customer fulfillment policies. This could include the S OP process described earlier in this chapter. Another option is operating cost reduction — supply chain level This implies that the supply chain manager will undertake or participate... 

Customer fulfillment What field service capabilities are needed Repair centers, spare parts distribution, and maintenance capability Will this be internal or external ... 

For storage, TLC leased warehouse space about 10 miles from its showroom. A part-time warehouse staff stored the merchandise for sale, showed customers around, and answered questions on available items. It soon became apparent that customers liked to browse the warehouse to make selections from available stock. So two models for customer fulfillment emerged early. One alternative was to special-order items on the factories and wait weeks and months for delivery. The other was to visit the warehouse and make a selection from the ample inventory. To reduce inventory, TLC also held occasional warehouse sales to purge it of slow-moving items. 

It is important to recognize that the three types of supply chain decisions— strategic, tactical, and operational—are interrelated. For example, the number and locations of plants affect the choice of suppliers and the transportation mode for receiving raw materials. Moreover, the number and locations of plants and warehouses also affect the inventory levels required at the warehouses and the delivery times of products to customers. Aggregate production planning decisions affect product availability and customer fulfillment. 

Tiffany maintained its own manufacturing facilities in Rhode Island and New York but also continued to source from third parties. In 2007, the company sourced almost 60 percent of its jewelry from internal manufacturing facilities. Tiffany had a retail service center in New Jersey that focused on receiving product from all over the world and replenishing its retail stores. The company had a separate customer fulfillment center for processing direct-to-customer orders. 

In a free society, profitable companies pay their employees well, sustain a number of vendors, satisfy a number of customers, fulfill stockholders investment objectives, and pay taxes to local, state, and federal governments (actually companies collect taxes for governments, as only people actually pay taxes). Companies that are unprofitable and cannot meet their bills are eventually sold or liquidated. In any event, a great many people lose their jobs beside the manager, and the stockholders investment suffers or is lost altogether. This is the ultimate test of management. If you can t run your company to make money, you won t get to run your company for very long. 

The system allows the inspeetion of all the blade roots of the whole engine within less than one hour. This is a very fast method which fulfils all the customer requirements concerning reliability, inspeetion speed and the inspeetion on the wings". 

More customer confidence by relieving them from coti-stant checks to ensure the required quality and timely delivery, partictilarly for custom-built and engineering products. In a third party order, the quality systems would also help to fulfil the customer s own contractual obligations to a client. 

For example, if a mixture contains a chemical (i.e., 12 percent zinc oxide) that is a member of a reportable chemical category (i.e., zinc compounds), the notification must include that the mixture contains a zinc compound at 12 percent by weight. Supplying only the weight percent of the parent metal (zinc) does not fulfill the requirement. The customer must be told the weight percent of the entire compound within a listed chemical category present in the mixture. 

The basic goal of quality management is the elimination of failure both in the concept and in the reality of our products, services, and processes. In an ideal world, if we could design products, services, and processes that could not fail we would have achieved the ultimate goal. Failure means not only that products, services, and processes would fail to fulfill their function but that their function was not what our customers desired. A gold-plated mousetrap that does not fail is not a success if no one needs a gold-plated mousetrap ... 

The ISO definition states that quality assurance is all those planned and systematic actions necessary to provide adequate confidence that an entity will fulfill requirements for quality. Both customers and managers have a need for quality assurance as they are not in a position to oversee operations for themselves. They need to place trust in the producing operations, thus avoiding constant intervention. 

Gas transmission companies require that impurities be removed from gas they purchase. They recognize the need for removal for the efficiem operation of their pipelines and their customers gas-burning equipment Consequently, contracts for the sale of gas to transmission companies always contain provisions regarding the quality of the gas that is delivered to them, and periodic tests are made to ascertain that requirements are being fulfilled by the seller. 

Karl Albrecht and Lawrence J. Bradford, The Service Advantage How to Identify and Fulfill Customer Needs, Dow Jones-Irwin, Homewood, Illinois, 1990. 

From a practical aspect, when the expression quality control is use, we tend to think in terms of a good or excellent product. In industry, it is one that fulfills customer s expectations. These expectations or standards of performance are based on the intended use and selling price of the product. Control is the process of regulating or directing an activity to verify its conformance to a standard/specification and to take corrective action if required. Therefore QC is the regulatory testing process for those activities that measure a product s performance, compare that performance with established standards/specifications, and pursue corrective action regardless of where those activities occur. 

There is still a large volume of unfulfilled customer demand. .. we do not serve any purpose by unnecessarily competing amongst ourselves to try to fulfil it. A structured approach is needed. ... 

Adequate labeling information to protect customers workers advice when mode of use involves new form or degree of hazard Adequate labeling and use information either to conform to statute or to fulfill common law obligations special requirements of federal and state insecticide or pure food laws... 

Short-term sales planning is sometimes supported by a demand fulfillment and available-to-promise (ATP) module. Its purpose is to match inventories and production orders with demands, if customers require reliable quotes with only short notice. 

The Ordering system attaches Orders to Customers and provides information about the demand for Products, although not the actual stock (see Figure 10.24). There are operations for creating new Customers, Orders, and Items. On a longer-term basis, new Products can be created. When an Order is fulfilled, it is removed from the outstanding list and linked to a new OrderFulfillment on the completed list. 

Except of the latest definition of Chopra/Meindl, all definitions share the aspect of cross-company management, the focus on volume management to fulfil customer needs. 

Result is a sales plan to be disaggregated on the individual customer basis. Sales volumes different to demand volumes are possible if sales flexibility in spot businesses exists compared to sales contracts that need to be fulfilled. 

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