Fulfillment in Supply Chain Management

Accenture helps clients achieve high performance by incorporating supply chains into their business strategies and mastering fulfillment's often paradoxical objectives.

For example, we help clients minimize inventories while maximizing inventory visibility and product availability; expand service levels while tightening service costs; and increase partnerships and alliances while reducing complexity.

Mastering these objectives is critical as the scope of fulfillment continues to expand. Business partnerships and "extended enterprises" are increasingly common. Material sources and product destinations span the world, with more parts, products and materials emanating from Asia.

Accenture research also reveals that, with more new products coming online more frequently, synchronization of the supply chain is more critical than ever. With shorter lead times and increasing customer expectations, companies struggle to raise service levels without raising prices. The demands on the fulfillment function are likewise increasing. Life cycles also have compressed more products into already constrained pipelines. And the pressure to shrink inventories, tighten costs and rein in labor expense continues unabated.

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Complementary Capabilities are Key to Accenture's Effectiveness.
In one sense, fulfillment is an old-school discipline—a cornerstone of logistics. So as one of the oldest and most seasoned logistics consultancies, Accenture is well-positioned to helps clients master fulfillment basics like warehouse management and operations, distribution network design, product flow path optimization, packaging, transportation management and customer service.

Strategic Insights and Strong Execution
However, fulfillment also employs many cutting-edge technologies and approaches. Accenture works with niche technology providers, including leading ERP companies like Oracle and SAP, to help clients leverage technology breakthroughs, adopt new operating models and synchronize operations. Our experience has shown that aggressive fulfillment initiatives can markedly improve a company's competitive positioning and help displace entrenched leaders. For this reason, we also excel at teaming with our clients to develop and implement advanced planning technologies, inventory management, forecasting, radio frequency identification systems, telematics, Web-based ordering, Far East product movement and event management tools.

Commitment to High Performance
Our commitment to the use of new and appropriate technologies, inter-enterprise collaboration and organizational change helps companies remain at the forefront of innovation and achieve high performance. As a result, our clients routinely experience fulfillment-based cost reductions in labor (10 to 30 percent) and transportation (15 to 30 percent), as well as improvements in service levels (five to 20 percent) and overall operational performance (20 to 40 percent).

Client Successes
Learn how Accenture teamed with Staples to transform its supply chain and achieve mastery in fulfillment