A Sporadic Customer Order Processing Model and Case Study for the Consumer Goods Industry

Abstract

This paper presents a reference business process model for handling sporadic customer orders in the consumer goods industry. We believe that handling sporadic customer orders due to private label actions of supermarkets as well as strong promotion actions has lately been risen to a major problem of consumer industries in their efforts to streamline their supply chain. Each one of these customer orders has specific packaging requirements and irregularity in demand which creates significant problems to the production/marketing interface. Usually there is difficulty in assigning a reliable delivery date, in pre-calculating customer order costs, and in production planning.