Overview

The planning process that determines how the actual customer demand is fulfilled is called demand fulfilment. The demand fulfilment process determines the first promise date for customer orders and thus strongly influences the order lead-time and the on time delivery. ^[3] In today's competitive markets it is important to generate fast and reliable order promises in order to retain customers and increase market share. This holds particularly true in an e-business environment: Orders are entered online in the e-business front end, and the customer expects to receive a reliable due date within a short time period.

Further, e-business solutions have to support online inquiries where the customer requests a reliable due date without committing the order.

The fast generation of reliable order promises gets more complex as

• the number of products increases,

• products are configured during the ordering process,

• the average product life cycles get shorter,

• the number of customers increases,

• flexible pricing policies are being introduced and

• demand variations increase and get less predictable.

The traditional approach of order promising is to search for inventory and to quote orders against it; if there is no inventory available, orders are quoted against the production lead-time. This procedure may result in non-feasible quotes, because a quote against the supply lead-time may violate other constraints, e. g. available capacity or material supply.

Modern demand fulfilment solutions based on the planning capabilities of APS employ more sophisticated order promising procedures, in...