Inventory availability & promising
In the supply chain industry, the products or services requested by means of an order must be checked for availability, promised, scheduled for shipment or delivery, and then shipped or delivered.
Sterling™ Order Management System utilizes the Order Promising component to give an inquiry of what
the customer is purchasing, which is directly affected by inventory availability. This component
also provides configurable rules that can be used for controlling the selection of nodes and
shipping dates for both products and services. As part of this highly configurable process, multiple
aspects are considered when putting together an order promise. The three layers involved in
inventory availability and promising are:
- Inventory
-
Note: If you are using IBM® Sterling Intelligent Promising Inventory Visibility for inventory management, see the IBM Sterling Intelligent Promising Inventory Visibility documentation.
- Provides extensive configuration rules to determine how to match supply and demand in the system
- Support both internal and external supply and availability
- Allows for promising across multiple fulfillment methods, including in-store pick up, home delivery, or delivery to another location.
- Supports modeling and understanding of various types of inventory - existing, future, lot controlled (tag), perishable (time sensitive) inventory
- Provides an availability monitor, which is a time-triggered monitor that raises global alerts when the available inventory falls below the configured quantity.
- Hot SKU intelligently enables and disables inventory DB locking to handle high transactional volumes and at the same time, preventing the system from overpromising.
- Promising
-
- Promising enables you to determine the optimal fulfillment node based on your business processes. Through use of Sourcing Rules, Distribution Groups - the system allows Enterprise organizations granular control on which nodes to consider when attempting to promise an order to a customer.
- Calculates dates for which the product can be shipped, delivered or picked up. This calculation is based on many exposed properties that scheduling engine understands, such as nodes working hours and days, amount of time node requires to prepare an order for shipment, amount of time required to procure inventory when required.
- Enables to run "Locate Inventory" and "Save the Sale" scenarios and evaluate alternate fulfillment options. For example, if a particular store does not have inventory, a sales person can look at availability in the surrounding stores as well as estimate how long it would take to transfer inventory into the existing store.
- Scheduling
-
- Scheduling uses inventory and promising to allocate an order based on the best fulfillment option.
- Has ability to handle out of stock situations by splitting lines, canceling unavailable quantity, raising alerts, or generating transfer orders to be fulfilled from alternate locations.