Fulfillment Systems Technology – What’s Right For You?

Years ago, while working for a large Technology company, our marketing department ran into a logistics nightmare head-on. Back then it was common practice to outsource work to multiple fulfillment companies around the world to meet our communication needs regionally as well as locally. The challenge occurred when we tried to manage multiple vendor ordering interfaces worldwide.

The problem boiled down to which system to run for which vendor and how to maintain a single view of inventory, cost, and distribution control for the organization. The core choices haven’t changed that much over time, it basically comes down to these three considerations:

1. Do we use our own internally-grown and supported database?
2. Do we use a particular fulfillment partners proprietary application?
3. Do we use a Software As A Service (SaaS) option?

We tried to use our own in-house solution – basically a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet on which we attempted to manage our incoming and outgoing order information. It worked for a short time, however grew into a burdonsome nightmare in its own right. Small businesses can typically survive in this fashion, however multi-billion dollar companies should never attempt it – as we later admitted to ourselves.

Following this, we jumped from managing multiple vendors to managing only a few vendors, through their in-house ”proprietary” software solution. Some of the solutions we tried worked well, while others were like undergoing a root-canal without anesthesia. As you can also imagine, it became a headache everytime we needed to change vendors. And we typically ended up paying more than we felt these services were ever worth.

Ultimately, we settled on the Software As A Service (SaaS) model, we contracted to use InterlinkOne’s online software system to interface with all our print and fulfillment vendors worldwide. Today, it’s still one of the SaaS software tools used by our company to manage inventory, orders, tracking, and reporting on behalf of our clients worldwide. We now had a robust inventory and order management system at a monthly fraction of the cost of buying or development of proprietary software.

So what’s my point you might ask?

Only this, that regardless of which model is working best for you today, it’s well worth investigating which options are (or will be) supported by your current or future fulfillment partner tomorrow.

Take the time, ask us the questions, reap the rewards of a better informed decision!

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