Understanding Fulfilments

Abstract

What is a Fulfilment ?

In the normal course of business, customers place orders that involve having blank products decorated.

At the end of the job production process, these blank products have been transformed into decorated products.

Once produced, the decorated products can either be:-

Delivered to an address (or addresses) specified by the customer.
Stored in the warehouse as decorated products. (The expectation being that they will be delivered to the customer at a future point.)

Fulfilment is the term used to describe the process by which decorated products are organised and delivered to a customer, and thus removed from the warehouse and related stock list.

(Note: It is worth bearing in mind that in the context of fulfilment, the term "delivery" refers to the physical despatch of goods to the customer. As such there can be several despatch methods -goods may be sent, for example, by overnight courier, postal service, direct courier, or the customer may actually elect to collect the goods direct from the warehouse)

Forms of Fulfilment

Although fulfilments are normally associated to a job order (i.e. they detail where the decorated goods produced by that job order should be sent), they don't necessarily have to be.

In addition, fulfilments are not always at the level of a single delivery per job. A fulfilment for a single job may involve delivering to multiple locations.

Furthermore, a single fulfilment might be made up from the decorated output from several job orders.

Lastly, a fulfilment might contain or be made up wholly of stock lines that were not created through job orders. .

Recognising this, flexibility has been built into strokeone to support fulfilments comprised of various permutations of job order to delivery.

Job Order *	Delivery	Comments
One	One	The fulfilment is a single delivery and comprised of all of the decorated product from a single job.
One	Many	The fulfilment is for multiple deliveries, and comprised of the decorated produce from a single job.
Many	One	The fulfilment is a single delivery and comprised of the decorated product from multiple jobs
Many	Many	The fulfilment is for multiple deliveries, and comprised of the decorated produce from multiple jobs
N/A	One or Many	The fulfilment is for one or more deliveries, and comprised of stock line items not created from jobs
Notes: In addition to the above paradigm, it should also be noted that it is possible to add any item of stock onto a fulfilment It is also worth noting that there can be residual balances of decorated product once the fulfilment has been processed. In other words, the totality of a job order's output is not necessarily always delivered. A customer may elect to have the majority of a product shipped, but keep some in storage for later usage.

Origins of Fulfilments

Fulfilments can originate from differing places.

They may be have been created manually within strokeone and:-
- associated to job orders.
- not associated to job orders (stand-alone).
They may have been created by an external client via the vendor site
They may have been created by a client web store

Irrespective of the origin of the fulfilment, once created, the processing workflow is to all intents and purposes, identical.

Fulfilment Charges

A fulfilments may have costs that are chargeable to the client.

The costs will vary depending on :-

The despatch method involved - e.g. whether by courier, and what speed of courier service
The complexity of the fulfilment - e.g. if there are a series of splits of the content, then the assembly effort increases
The packing material - e.g. if particular boxes are required.

The final costs involved with the fulfilment may not be known at the outset of the client order, and/or they may change during the processing of the order due to a variety of factors. (It is worth noting that fulfilment costs may be zero, should the assembly effort be modest and the client collects the order)

Once the finalised costs are known and agreed with the client, they are finalised onto the fulfilment. (Should costs have already been pre-agreed with the client which differ from these finalised costs, then the client should be re-contacted, and approval obtained prior to despatching any goods)

Once finalised costs have been recorded, the fulfilment can be marked as being ready for invoice so that the accounts department can send the corresponding invoice to the client.
It is important to understand that depending on circumstances, the invoice for the fulfilment element of a job order may be send separately to the invoice for the production element of a job order. For example:-

The fulfilment might be created until sometime after the production order has been completed and invoiced.
The fulfilment costs might be known and agreed, and thus invoiced before the job order has completed.
The fulfilment might be for a series of job orders that may or may not have already been invoiced and thus there is not a one to one relationship between the fulfilment invoice and the job order invoice.