Basic configuration
Some preliminary configuration is related to promising the delivery services that are required with Sterling™ Order Management System. Most of the basic configuration described in this section is defined by the Enterprise organization. To set up your basic configuration for slot availability inquiries, you must set the following parameters as described:
Are delivery sourcing rules defined?
Sourcing rules control the delivery node selection. If you set this parameter with a value of "Yes", the delivering location is determined based on your sourcing rules setup. If this value is set to "No", any delivery location that serves the "shipping region" can be selected by Sterling Order Management System. If you have organized your delivery locations such that their delivery regions do not intersect with each other, you can set this configuration as "No" and Sterling Order Management System picks up the correct delivering location based on the delivery regions of each node.
If multiple delivery locations could serve the same region and you want to set up sourcing rules for determining the right delivery location, you should set this parameter to "Yes".
Capacity organization?
Sterling Order Management System uses the Capacity organization parameter as a mechanism for separating capacity definition into distinct silos. All resource pools defined in Sterling Order Management System belong to one, and only one, capacity organization. An organization can use only resource pools that are defined within the same capacity organization as that of the organization. This definition allows Sterling Order Management System to provide complete isolation for organizations that should not share any resource pools.
You should set up your capacity organization so that it refers to the correct silo. An organization can have one and only one capacity organization and services performed by this organization must be scheduled through a resource pool of the same capacity organization.
Is capacity kept externally?
This parameter controls whether or not the resource pool's capacity is maintained within Sterling Order Management System. This parameter is kept at a capacity organization level and if set to "Y", Sterling Order Management System assumes that capacity for all resource pools should be fetched in real-time during slot availability checks.
A few of the situations when you would want to set this to "Y" are:
- You are using third-party fleet management tools and do not want to define the slot capacity for each resource pool within Sterling Order Management System. During slot availability checks, Sterling Order Management System makes a real-time user exit call to find slot availability of the resource pool. You can pass back the availability as read from your fleet management software. Note that even though capacity can be kept externally, resource pools must still be defined in Sterling Order Management System.
- You are using third-party service providers who can provide slot availability in real-time. You can define a resource pool representing the third-party provider and make a real-time call to this provider during slot availability checks to get the latest availability picture.