Get ready for an exciting one... I started this many months ago for my new postiion, since I have like zero knowledge in fulfillment and supply chains.

A Book of Non Fiction: The Definitive Guide to Order Fulfillment and Customer Service by the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals

This is the most authoritative and complete guide to planning, implementing, measuring, and optimizing world-class supply chain order fulfillment and customer service processes. Straight from the Council of Supply Chain Management Professionals (CSCMP), it brings together up-to-the-minute knowledge and best practices for all facets of order fulfillment and customer service process management, from initial customer inquiry through post sales service and support. CSCMP and contributor Stanley Fawcett introduce crucial concepts ranging from customer order cycles to available-to-promise and supply chain RFID to global order capture networks.

The book begins by discussing how to be successful in any business, which boils down to "if you don't have and can keep customers, then your business will fail." Not a lot of detail or information on fulfillment or supply chains.

Next it goes into describing the fulfillment workflow and business, as well as focusing on what aspects of that process make or break a company. Emphasis on customer satisfaction is apparent.

Building good and strong customer relationships is an overarching topic, which is important, an idea that never should be far from mind when setting up any type of business.

Many pages are dedicated to looking at Amazon, Wal-Mart and other large and/or successful fulfillment companies and determining what did and didn't work for them.

It is important to consider and include IT in fulfillment solutions, but IT is not the solution, nor will it help solve issues without people's insight nor informed planning. Willingness to adopt and setting up information connectivity are the two main issues that halt effectively using IT to solve fulfillment needs.

One of the keys to successfully renovating and setting up a fulfillment team/system is to measure the performance and learn where to improve. However, an important point to that is knowing what to measure, how to read that data and what to do with the results. Without those points, improvement will not happen and one could decide to make changes that actually hurt the team. Gauging performance against industry standards and competitors is important, but if the clients have different targets, it does not matter how you compare, if the client is unhappy. A major hurdle for supply chain measurement is knowing what one should measure and what one can measure, and with new technologies and processes being developed, that lack of knowledge is always growing.

As a side note, each chapter had a small piece of a story of an example company looking at their supply chain and fulfillment process and trying to figure out why they thought they were doing well but their largest customer was unhappy. It was interesting and put what I would read in the chapter in a real world light. Pity the situation wasn't wrapped up at the end of the book.


Rating: B

2014 Reading Bingo

A book with more than 500 Pages Storm of Swords	A Forgotten Classic	A Book that Became a Movie The Maze Runner	A Book Published this Year Battle of Will	A Book with a Number in the Title
A Book Written by Someone Under Thirty	A Book with Non-Human Characters Shards of Time	A Funny Book Let's Pretend This Never Happened	A Book by a Female Author	A Book with a Mystery Carnal Sacraments
A Book with a One-Word Title Coraline	A Book of Short Stories	Free Square The Wise Man's Fear	A Book Set on a Different Continent Shattered	A Book of Non Fiction The Definitive Guide to Order Fulfillment and Customer Service
The First Book by a Favorite Author If We Shadows	A book you Heard About Online Meeting on Mars	A Best-Selling Book A Feast for Crows	A Book Based on a True Story	A Book at the Bottom of your To Be Read Pile A Light In The Dark
A Book Your Friend Loves The Graveyard Book	A Book that Scares You	A Book that is More Than 10 Years Old Ender's Game	The Second Book in a Series Ghost Train to New Orleans	A Book with a Blue Cover The Name of the Wind

Links in the table go to the reviews for that book. The cover links to the Amazon page.