Fulfillment planning optimizes the buying and selling process. It is the point in the Supply Chain Management (SCM) process where real demand has to be satisfied from a plan that was generated from forecasted demand as well as material and capacity constraints. The goal is to satisfy a customer's request quickly, fully, and accurately while minimizing cost to the vendor. Ultimately, order fulfillment determines how, when, and where an order will be fulfilled.

An important benefit of fulfillment planning is increased customer satisfaction due to the ability to immediately promise a fulfillment date for an order. With z!™ Fulfillment you can safely promise actual dates while the other guy is still using phrases like "usually ships in 24 hours."

 

Actual demand rarely, if ever, matches forecasted demand. That means that the supply plans a vendor develops become out of date as soon as the actual demand begins to arrive. After the first promise a vendor makes, their supply plan is out of date. They need to change the plan to reflect that they have promised some product to one customer and thus it is no longer available to promise to other customers. In addition, current and future supply deviates from the plan due to factors such as late arrival of inventory from suppliers and loss of inventory from damage or theft.

We are in the age of real time, where decisions are made NOW. Customers are demanding instant visibility into the availability of products and the status of their orders. Delays in getting that information to a customer very likely means they will not be a customer in the future. And with the global marketplace that e-commerce represents, thousands of customers, as well as intelligent agents and web 'bots', can be online at any given time, resulting in thousands of requests per second. Updating the supply chain in this case is no trivial task. And given that a customer wants an answer NOW, it better happen quickly.

 

We see online retailers beginning to sell enormous numbers of different products, millions and millions of SKUs. It is becoming impractical to try to solve problems of this size in 1 large monolith. As the number of products managed grows, it is necessary to get larger and larger machines. While there may be monoliths large enough to solve these increasingly large problems, they are prohibitively expensive. And the cost of redundancy and availability, maintenance, skill sets, etc. can truly make centralized approaches based on monoliths unfeasible.

This is also true of the increases in throughput requirements. The requirements are getting larger and larger. No one knows yet where it is going. With the increase in throughput comes a need for increase in CPUs. Again, in a monolithic approach, this can be prohibitively expensive.

Through our clustering architecture and proprietary protocols we can:

1. Increase the size of the problem managed by the system.
2. Increase concurrency, resulting in more throughput and faster round trip times (RTT).
3. Use cheaper hardware.
4. Provide true high availability (HA) via replication and redundancy. To achieve true HA a system must replicate. This means that it must run over a network. When determining RTT it is necessary to include this in the calculation. We take advantage of replication to increase throughput and use active replication to achieve redundancy.

 

We integrate with and enhance an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation, where the need for a best in class order fulfillment solution is critical to the success of an enterprise. Unfortunately, the ERP vendors have been unable to truly produce the savings they have promised. ERP has provided benefits in the areas of defining and organizing the data model of a business but have fallen short in the area of using the data to optimize the operations of a business. z!™ Fulfillment has the intelligence to use the data provided by an ERP implementation and finally give meaning to the P (planning) in ERP.

 

Unlike traditional vendors of SCM products, we believe that supply chains are dynamic structures that require online real time planning to maximize profit, not daily or weekly batch runs. Our goal is to develop the technology that allows the planning and management of global supply chains to occur in real time. Our current product, z!™ Fulfillment, is the first step in realizing our goal and it is proof of concept that extremely large supply chain problems can be solved orders of magnitude faster than traditional SCM vendors' solutions. It uses a very lean representation of a supply chain incorporating components such as Bills of Distribution (BOD), Bills of Materials (BOM), and Bills of Work (BOW), as well as the business rules needed to implement Available-To-Promise (ATP), and Capable-To-Promise (CTP) functionality.

In the future, we plan to use the technologies present in z!™ Fulfillment to provide extremely fast and scalable solutions in the areas of demand forecasting, master planning, inventory planning, and allocation management.