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Hello!

I wanted to outline an issue we’re having with Availability calculations and how to account for high volume SOs that require future stock for fulfillment. Hopefully other companies have experienced this problem and may have some good ideas.

Let’s say we have 1,000 units of SKU X on hand and available in our domestic warehouse. We also have 20,000 units of SKU X on PO at one of our vendors. We don’t currently include Qty on PO in our availability calculation because it can take 60+ days to ship POs and 30+ days of transit time.

A big wholesale customer places an SO for 5,000 units of SKU X, with the plan to have this fulfilled sometime in the future after the 20,000 units arrive. Right now, this type of situation drops our Qty Available down to -4,000 and it’s confusing to other sales reps whether there is any inventory to sell. Indeed, there is actually 1,000 units still available to sell.

Ideas we’ve thought of:

  • Linking this SO line to the pre-existing PO line. This resolves the Qty Available number, but it puts the status of all those 20,000 units into QtyPOFixedOrders (INSiteStatus table), when it should only put 5,000 units in that status and keep 15,000 in QtyPOOrders. It appears to only allow one status for each PO line, which doesn’t paint an accurate picture of what’s going on.
  • Forcing this SO into Back Order status and adjusting Availability Calc rules to exclude Back Order. This might have potential, but there isn’t anything reserving those 5,000 units for this SO when the inventory does come back into stock.

Also, our PO receipt process for these vendor transactions is very messy. As I mentioned, it takes 30+ days to ship product to our domestic warehouse. Our current practice is to receive inventory into a different warehouse than was on the PO (one called In Transit). Then, once the goods finally arrive, we create a 1-step transfer from In Transit to our domestic warehouse.

So, we can’t really link an SO line into inventory that’s already In Transit, which we often need to do when bigger SOs get created that require that In Transit stock.

Have other users had similar problems? How do you account for long shipping times in your PO Receipt process?

I believe, the option 1 “Linking this SO line to the pre-existing PO line.” should work for you. I am not sure how big you are gping to be impacted by the overstated QtyPOFixedOrders - in this scenario, it does not lead to incorrect available qty, plus you always has the option to compare it with QtySOFixedProduction and treat the surplus as qty on purchase orders

 

Also, the ‘Purchase to SO’ functionality allows to handle receipt to different warehosue than in SO smooether than you described. After such receipt is done, the system creates a line in the Allocations tabl of SO301000 screen with ‘Allocated’ = true and Warehouse = warehosue in receipt. Then transfer order can be created from this line via SO509000 screen to transfer stock to SO warehosue and allocate there

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