Scheduling shipment of an order or order line
Sterling Order Management System Software provides parameters at various levels to ensure that you have the controls you need to schedule or not to schedule an order or order line for shipment until a specific time.
- Status control
- Earliest schedule date
Status control
This is an order line level control - the order line status should be configured as an available status for the scheduling transaction.
Earliest schedule date
This control is used to ensure that future orders are not scheduled too much in advance and thus prevent blocking of available inventory for current or ASAP orders.
The earliest date when an order line can be scheduled is calculated as follows:
- A date can be specified during order line creation. If specified, that date is used as the earliest schedule date.
- If a date was not specified, Sterling Order Management System Software calculates
the eligible schedule date as:
- The lowest of the following values to determine
the maximum number of days to schedule before
- Scheduling rule level parameter "Schedule lead time"
- Node level parameter "Max days to schedule before". This parameter is used only if node was pre-specified on the order line. If node is not pre-specified, the sourcing step re-determines the earliest schedule date and can decide not to schedule the order line at that time.
- Sterling Order Management System Software then calculates this date as the "ship date" of the order line - the maximum days to schedule before as determined earlier. The requested ship date specified on the order is used as the "ship date". If no specific requested ship date was specified, Sterling Order Management System Software calculates an approximate ship date based on the requested delivery date and the best guess transit time calculation. Note that the approximate ship date calculations may be inaccurate as the actual node from where shipment is being made may not be known. You should ensure that the "Max days to schedule" parameter is set in such a way that the scheduling operation is performed on the order well in time.
- The lowest of the following values to determine
the maximum number of days to schedule before
Scheduling shipment of an order line
Given the following scenario, the earliest schedule date is calculated as indicated in the following table.
- You are creating an order line on June 29th 2003 with product as ITEM1.
- You have pre-specified the node on the line as
NODE1.
Your parameters are set as
- Scheduling rules - Schedule lead time = 30 days
- NODE1 - Max Schedule days = 10 days
If requested ship date is... | the earliest schedule date is calculated as... |
---|---|
July 15th 2003 | July 5th 2003 and the order is not scheduled until that time. |
June 30th 2003 | June 29th 2003 and the order is ready for scheduling from this control's perspective. |
not specified but a requested delivery date is specified as July 15th, 2003 and the initial transit time was calculated as 3 days | July 2nd 2003. This is because the "ship date" is calculated as July 12th 2003 and hence the July 2nd calculation. |
not specified and no requested delivery date is specified | June 29th, 2003. |
In each of these instances, order lines are considered for scheduling only after the date calculated. If you want to schedule your order lines as soon as they are created, you should set the maximum scheduling days to a high value such as 999.