Business Purpose
To become more competitive, many organizations are moving to outsource functions such as order fulfillment. This process can provide the structure necessary to complete an effective order fulfillment process. A purchase order process must already be implemented between buying and selling trading partners to trigger the Order Fulfillment process.

When the buyer validates and accepts the purchase order, the seller initiates the Order Fulfillment process by sending a request for shipment either to its own distribution center or to a logistics provider. The distribution center or the logistics provider determines the availability of the item from the optimal source location and confirms this with the seller.
If the selling partner sends the shipping request to a third party, two options are available:

• The seller includes its logistics provider in the public process by adding a third partner, Partner C, to the process.
  
• The seller defines a separate public process for the collaboration with its logistics provider.
  
• In the latter case, Partner C, the logistics provider, is not visible to Partner A, the online seller, but only to Partner B, the supplier. From a best practice perspective, the latter option makes more sense. As a result, Partner C is not part of this Order Fulfillment process.

Process Description
The process is initiated as a result of a purchase order, a replenishment
order, or direct inventory withdrawal, or at any time a decision to ship
inventory has been made.

1. The process initiator, Partner A, issues a Shipping_Request business
   object.
   
2. The distributing partner, Partner B, checks inventory and determines if
   there are sufficient products available to fulfill the purchase order
   requirements. Partner B then creates a Shipping_Request_Response that indicates
   which items are available to ship, in what quantity, and when they will be
   shipped.
   
3. Upon receipt of the response, Partner A evaluates it and then takes one of
   the following actions.
   
   · If there is sufficient product to fulfill the order and the conditions of the order are otherwise acceptable, Partner A issues a Shipping_Confirmation.
   · If the proposed shipment is either invalid or insufficient to fulfill the terms of the purchase order, Partner A reissues a Shipping_Request to Partner B. Note:This part of the process continues to loop until Partner A approves the contents of the Shipping_Request_Response and issues a Shipping_Confirmation to Partner B.
   
4. Partner B issues its own Shipping_Confirmation to Partner A.
   
5. When Partner A processes the confirmation from Partner B, the process
   ends.