Scenario: Shipping commitment day promises

As a fulfillment manager, depending on the order to fulfill, you consider on-hand and future availability to promise shipping commitment days to customers. There are different scenarios available when promising commitment dates to customers to fulfill orders. In some scenarios, it makes more sense to look at future availability to consider a longer period in the future. However, in other circumstances, you might want to limit the availability to a shorter, defined period only.

Scenarios

The following scenarios describe how to provide a delivery estimate to the customer:
  • For an item with an availability window up to 10 days.
  • For on-hand inventory only.

Shipping commitment day promises for on-hand and future availability up to 10 days

In this scenario, the inventory picture today on 5 October depicts the following availability windows. The availability windows describe the number of products available in a specific duration.
  • Availability window: Current to 10 October, quantity 5
  • Availability window: 7 October to 11 October, quantity 4
  • Availability window: 1 December, quantity 100

By default, the inventory system is set to look ahead while availability exists. This results in the fulfillment manager committing a quantity up to 109, for example: 5+4+100=109, even if the last availability window is a few months into the future.

Another fulfillment manager might want to limit this look ahead window from an infinite view to a shorter, defined period, such as 10 days. In this scenario, you set the maxFutureAvailabilityLookahead attribute to 10 days. As a result, the availability window is limited up to 15 October and only a quantity of 9 is committed for fulfillment.

Shipping commitment day promises for on-hand availability only

In this scenario, as a fulfillment manager, you might want to fulfill the order by looking at on-hand availability only. To limit the system from a future lookup, you set the maxFutureAvailabilityLookahead attribute to 0. As a result, the maximum availability of the product is 5 that comes from the current availability window. As today is 5 October, the system does not look at an availability window beyond today.

If you have a business requirement to limit the future order capture up to a definite number of days, you can define the maxFutureAvailabilityLookahead attribute at the tenant or API level. For more information, see Shipping commitment days.