Sustainability, Vol. 12, Pages 2871: Creating Sustainable Order Fulfillment Processes Through Managing the Risk: Evidence from the Disposable Products Industry (Sustainability)

Retailers face a major operational challenge in fulfilling online orders while managingtheir traditional store-based distribution processes. In this context, the following order fulfillmentoptions available to retailers are considered: store-facing distribution centers (DCs), dedicated orderfulfillment facilities (DTCs), retail stores, and direct-fill by vendors. The current study provides anorder fulfillment evaluation for the Disposable Products Industry, which is one of the industriesthat 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 resultsshow that the order fulfillment risk factors identified from various research studies are good enoughfor the Disposable Products Industry, even though they are not intentionally designed for thishighly diversified industry. Among them, sustainability is the most important factor that thecompanies in the Disposable Products Industry should pay attention to. This is becausesustainability is believed to lead to large deviations in various types of order fulfillment losses andincur a higher chance of having the order fulfillment failure for the companies with an internationalcustomer base. The companies should focus on how to improve the sustainability (long-termrelationships with the various parties along the chain) rather than over-emphasis on the short-termdocumentation accuracy as the long-term improvement is likely to result in an overall improvementin performance on order fulfillment.