Creating Sustainable Order Fulfillment Processes through Managing the Risk: Evidence from the Disposable Products Industry

Retailers face a major operational challenge in fulfilling online orders while managing their traditional store-based distribution processes. In this context, the following order fulfillment options available to retailers are considered: store-facing distribution centers (DCs), dedicated order fulfillment facilities (DTCs), retail stores, and direct-fill by vendors. The current study provides an order fulfillment evaluation for the Disposable Products Industry, which is one of the industries that have a tremendous effect over the downstream industries, as it is the source for production. Also, the differences in the factor focus are provided for various parties and countries. The results show that the order fulfillment risk factors identified from various research studies are good enough for the Disposable Products Industry, even though they are not intentionally designed for this highly diversified industry. Among them, sustainability is the most important factor that the companies in the Disposable Products Industry should pay attention to. This is because sustainability is believed to lead to large deviations in various types of order fulfillment losses and incur a higher chance of having the order fulfillment failure for the companies with an international customer base. The companies should focus on how to improve the sustainability (long-term relationships with the various parties along the chain) rather than over-emphasis on the short-term documentation accuracy as the long-term improvement is likely to result in an overall improvement in performance on order fulfillment.