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[Chris Soraparu]

Has anyone been using reservations? If so, how do you like using this function in NAV? Have you run into any obstacles or are there any downsides to using this function?

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Chris Soraparu
Tri Star Metals LLC
Carol Stream IL
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[Robin Mitschke]

?Yes we are using reservations now.  There are up’s and down’s with it.  We just turned them on this past year so still trying to figure out the best way to manage.  Using reservations you lose track of inventory on hand.  Since most of our items need to have specific information on them – this was best way to keep things segregated here. That is the up side of it.  The down side is losing track of inventory because it’s made to order not make to stock.  Your sales team needs to check inventory levels and assign reservations on sales orders if you have inventory not being sold.  We do have overruns come through ever once in a while. 
Do you have any specific questions?

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Robin Mitschke
MRP/Purchasing Specialist
PECKHAM, INC
LANSING MI
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[Victor Diercksen]

Hello,

I have tried using reservations a couple of times in the past and it never seems to work.  The functionality is solid, the problem is that sales and customer service make a lot of ‘exceptions’ outside of the standard business policies that are impossible to manage if you start using reservations.  

The result is that it is extra work to make the reservation, then it is also extra work to reverse the reservation and apply it to a different customer when they want/need to do so.  Eventually they just gave up using reservations.

What I find works better is to modify the Item Availability calculation.  Instead of calculating quantity on hand minus open sales orders, you should look at your lead time by item and calculate ‘Quantity on Hand’ – Open Sales Orders (Within your lead time)+scheduled deliveries within your lead time.
Example: Quantity on Hand = 100
Open Sales Orders (today plus 2 weeks)= 95
Scheduled PO Deliveries (today plus 2 weeks) = 25

Net available to ship in the next two weeks = 30. This is what appears on the sales line as you are entering the sales order.

This assumes that it takes 2 weeks to replenish product from your vendor for this item.

Victor

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Victor Diercksen
Director of Inspirational Technology
Mity Inc.
Sandy UT
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[Patrick Hulst]

Our experience is similar to ?.

<NOTE: we are retail … but have a lot of different things we do based on the store / customer interaction>

For the TRUE special order (IE I am ordering you a custom widget from a vendor for a customer) this works great.  We can link the SO to the PO, add some customization / alerting when that product shows up to put it aside for you instead of selling it, etc.  In that sense reservations work fantastic and have a huge process benefit for us.  

You can link a sales order line to an incoming PO line.  Same idea as the use case above – this helps us set stock aside for you upon receipt.  

The lumber yard is a very different beast.  We’ve got trucks rolling in and out all day, every day.  Reserving against PO’s or inventory in such a fluid area would never work for us.  IE if you have committed orders going 3 weeks out and 3 trucks coming in with full loads between then and now doesn’t mean I can’t fill an order today if the stock is reserved for an order in 2 weeks.  There isn’t a need in that area to create more (virtual) paperwork and we would rather just use views to handle what is and isn’t capable to fill.

NAV does add limitations to what you can do on a sale.  IE: you cannot sell a sales line that has a reservation against a PO line – it needs to be received.  NAV adjusts / recalculates things if you adjust the PO / SO.  Adjusting expected receipt date on a PO can remove a reservation.  If a vendor can’t fill the order then it’s a manual update of the reservation entry on the SO to the new PO.  

My suggestion is open up the Cronus (or a test) database and try your business processes against it.  It may work perfectly for you, it may change some processes (for better or worse or just different), and it may break your staff.

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Patrick Hulst
Retail Applications Projects Manager
Home Hardware Stores Limited
St Jacobs ON
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[Theresa Davis]

We use reservations in NAV2016.  If you stay on top of it, they work fine.  We use them extensively to reserve components to Production orders.

The problems or should I say challenges happen when people make a n inventory adjustment and ignore the warning about the product being reserved and just go ahead and adjust the product out.  Then we end up with released production orders that used to have product reserved to them and then someone reserves product to a firm planned order and you have to unreserve that before you can post the consumption for the released orders.

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Theresa Davis
Systems Analyst
Group O
Rock Island IL
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[Josh Flagner]

Hi Chris,

I’ve found that using reservations for the bulk of our day-to-day work is frustrating for those of use on the manufacturing and shipping end of the process. Everyone who’s said that it adds steps and work is in line with my experience…

BUT… There are two customers who place tons of sales orders for a few of the same parts and sometimes they’re all due on the same day. I’ve found that for these instances it actually helps to use reservations (either by changing the part number or the planning off the sales order) to keep all of the orders and inventory ready to ship on the correct days and on the correct sales orders. I leave the reservations active until they’re ready to ship, then just delete the reservation and no one is the wiser.

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Josh Flagner
Cleveland Tank & Supply, Inc
Cleveland OH
216-771-8265
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[Chris Soraparu]

Great info from everyone and this is exactly the type of feedback that I was hoping to get. My company was considering using reservation, but I will now steer them in a different direction. Any other suggestions on how to “reserve” or show demand for a starting component other than putting it on a sales order? This works but I loose tractability to what exact PO the starting component is coming from. I would ideally like to see my total demand for a component and then be able to drill down to see the specific demand for each PO for that component. The “Event” screen almost gives me all the info that I need but I have to drill through numerous screens to get all the that info.

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Chris Soraparu
Tri Star Metals LLC
Carol Stream IL
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[Josh Flagner]

Chris,

Here’s a snippet of my RPO screen. As you can see, I had our partner add a Sales Order No. and Customer Name field to the order header. If you’re planning from the planning worksheet, you can hit the Order Tracking button on the RPO and it will tell you where the demand is from, even without using reservations in the manner you were asking about. 

It does add a step to copy the sales order number to the Sales Order No. field (the customer name field fills in automatically based on the SO#), but it’s very worthwhile to have this info attached in NAV and printing out on the RPO when it goes to the floor.

This might solve your first question, but I don’t have much feedback on your second question. I also would love to be able to look at a BOM and see inventory levels of components easily, along with scheduled replenishments. 

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Josh Flagner
Cleveland Tank & Supply, Inc
Cleveland OH
216-771-8265
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[Angela Dunnahoe]

Thanks to everyone who has replied in this discussion.  We are also considering using reservations for our DC operation but trying to avoid it.  We currently use reservations with lot tracking for custom made-to-order items, and that has worked for the most part. It’s extremely annoying if the SO or PO somehow gets separated from the lot number and/or reservation, but we have been using that for several years now.  

Where we are considering using it is in the regular DC operations.  We have 4-6 month lead times for product manufactured overseas, and our customers will provide orders and forecasts for the next 6 months in order to have sufficient inventory.  However, NAV doesn’t know who we were planning to sell the goods to, so if Customer A forecasted 1000 in March, and Customer B forecasted 0 but placed an order for 1000 in February, we could essentially ship all of the goods to a customer who didn’t forecast.  We have settled this for our larger customers by creating virtual (and physical) warehouse locations that are used to manage big box customers, but we have hundreds of customers (particularly in 3 larger forecast groups) who can’t be segregated with virtual warehouses.  

We are planning on building a screen in NAV that will help us understand lead time availability (as someone mentioned above) as well as “forecast remaining” for a specific customer or group.  That would then allow us to make a “release/do not release” decision at the line level.  We definitely have not figured this out, so if anyone has built something like this, PLEASE CHIME IN! I would love to hear your ideas.

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Angela Dunnahoe
Marucci Sports
Baton Rouge LA
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