More companies than ever are relying on order fulfillment excellence to enhance their standing with their customers and their performance in the marketplace.

At the same time, the number of inventory turns is declining.

That's according to the report "Delivering Fulfillment Excellence: A Global Survey on Fulfillment Trends and Performance" based on a survey by Accenture (404-880-9100) of order fulfillment practices by leading North American, European and Asian companies.

"Overall, we found that product availability has improved and the cost of fulfilling an order has declined," said Gary Godfrey, an associate partner in Accenture's supply chain practice. "But inventory turns is the area that has not improved. In some cases, like retail, it has trended downward."

What that suggests to Godfrey is that companies are providing better customer service and ensuring that product is available to promise by increasing their inventory levels.

In fact, a number of the 184 responding executives told Accenture that higher inventories and lower turns are an inevitable result of improvements in availability.

The study also concluded, however, that more inventory might be a consequence of a lackluster economy "which has kept companies from pursuing initiatives that might improve overall supply chain effectiveness."

For the purposes of the study, Accenture defined fulfillment as the completion of a sales order or the process of supplying a product directly from a manufacturing plant to a distributor or end user.

According to Godfrey, most companies have taken notice of the success of supply chain leaders like Dell and Wal-Mart. As a result, they now recognize that fulfillment today is critical to the success of their companies.

Being able to ship complete and accurate orders, for instance, is an important component of how suppliers are measured by their customers. In addition, companies understand that their ability to fulfill orders has a direct impact on their current revenues and future growth.

"If a company doesn't have an item in stock or can't deliver a complete order, their customer will buy it from someone else," Godfrey says.

One consequence of this heightened attention to fulfillment practices is that the laggards are making major investments in their systems and processes. Those investments, in turn, are closing the gap between the supply chain leaders and laggards.

"We concluded that for leading companies to maintain their competitive gap, they're going to have to challenge themselves with new supply chain initiatives," notes Godfrey.

"We believe that the next opportunity is going to be in the area of collaboration with your customers and suppliers," he adds. "There's still a lot of inefficiencies in the supply chain, and we haven't cracked the code of optimizing across multiple enterprises."

At the same time, Godfrey adds, there are still a lot of organizational barriers that have to be overcome to make that happen.