Inventory availability safety factor

Sterling™ Order Management System enables you to define an inventory availability safety factor that indicates what percentage of current or future inventory should be excluded during order promising.

About this task

For example, you may consider that your Planned Purchase Order supply is less reliable than your In Transit supply for order promising. Therefore, you may want to exclude 60% of the Planned Purchase Order supply type when promising, as opposed to 10% of the In Transit supply type.

By default, fractional quantities are not truncated. That functionality can be turned off by modifying the yfs.install.displaydoublequantity property in the <INSTALL_DIR>/properties/customer_overrides.properties file.

The behavior is as follows:

  • If the property is set to Y, the fractional quantity is used after applying the percentage. This is the default behavior.
  • If the property is set to N, the fractional quantity is truncated to the nearest lower integer after applying the percentage. For example, if a purchase order is placed with a quantity of 10, and the inventory availability safety factor percentage of the PO_PLACED supply type is set to 25%, a quantity of 7 would be available to fulfill future demand, as opposed to 7.5.

To modify, enable, or disable the inventory availability safety factor:

Procedure

  1. From the tree in the application rules side panel, choose Inventory Types and Considerations > Inventory Availability Safety Factor. The Inventory Availability Safety Factor window displays in the work area. Refer to Table 1 for field descriptions.
    Table 1. Inventory availability safety factor window.

    Inventory availability safety factor field value descriptions
    Field Description
    Supply Type The name of the supply type.
    Description The description of the supply type.
    Apply Safety Factor Check this if you want to exclude the specified safety factor percentage during order promising for this supply type.
    Note: For safety factors to apply, this flag must also be checked for the node type and scheduling rule.
    Safety Factor Percentage The percentage you want to exclude during order promising for this supply type.
  2. To modify current inventory availability safety factors, select the Current Inventory Availability Safety Factor tab. To modify future inventory availability safety factors, select the Future Inventory Availability Safety Factor tab.
  3. To modify the Safety Factor Percentage, double-click the desired percentage and enter a new value, between 0 and 100.
    Note: The Safety Factor Percentage indicates the percentage to exclude during order promising.
  4. To enable or disable the safety factor, check or uncheck the desired Apply Safety Factor check box.
  5. Click the Save icon.

Results

A Safety Factor Percentage or Quantity specified for an individual item overrides values specified for a supply type.