Order: where demand becomes commitment

What it is. Order describes the activities associated with the customer’s purchase of products and services — quoting, order capture and validation, promising, allocation, and the management of the order through to invoicing. It is the newest Level-1 process: SCOR DS split classic Deliver into Order and Fulfill, recognizing that committing to a customer and executing that commitment are different disciplines with different failure modes. A missed promise made carelessly and a good promise executed badly look identical on a scorecard; the split lets each be diagnosed where it actually broke. Order is also where the customer’s terms enter the system — tiers, service-level agreements, penalty clauses — the context that turns an order line into an obligation with a price on failure.

The questions it answers. Can we promise this order, and against which supply? When commitments exceed availability, who ships and who waits — and what does each answer cost? What is each open commitment exposing us to, contractually and relationally? Is the order book clean enough that the demand the other processes plan against is real demand, not stale or duplicated lines?

The metrics that matter.

Measure	SCOR DS	What it tells you
Perfect Customer Order Fulfillment	RL.1.1	The headline: in full, on time, documented, undamaged — every component must pass
Percentage of Orders Delivered In Full to the Customer	RL.2.1	The in-full component on its own, so quantity misses can’t hide behind timing
Order Cycle Time	RS.2.1	How long an order takes to move through its stages — and where it waits
Order Management Cost	CO.2.1	Rising cost per order at flat volume means exceptions are eating the order desk
Order Supply Chain Agility	AG.2.1	How fast the order process absorbs a sustained change in demand

Where the decisions live. Allocation under scarcity is the signature: available-to-promise falls short of committed demand, and the same fill rate carries very different exposure depending on who is served first. We work that decision end to end — four strategies, one port strike — in the ATP short-ship example. The second recurring decision is the promise itself: a defensible promise date is derived from confirmed supply events, and when it changes, the change is written back to the ERP where the rest of the chain can see it.

SCOR is ASCM’s framework; coded metrics reference the SCOR DS quick reference.