[Rob Beals]

I’m working with customer service, trying to simplify how we report back confirmed ship dates to customers. 

Scenario: 
Sales order line entered, go to reservations & discover no inventory. 
Go to Net Requirements to see production orders vs open sales order lines. 
The top line is On Hand Inventory – which shows plenty of inventory available. 
Then a listing, sorted by requirement dates, of all sales orders & productions. 

My struggle: 
On hand shows inventory because some of those sales orders have inventory reserved, waiting to be released & shipped. Inventory is still physically in the building, but it’s not available to sell.

I’m under the assumption that Net Requirements is the best place for customer service to figure and provide confirmed ship dates. If anyone knows of a different way, please do tell. 

In Net Requirements, Is there a way to see what sales orders have inventory already reserved to them? Does anyone have experience using N.R. successfully when providing future ship dates to customers? I can’t even see customer names, only account numbers. I have to hover over the Sales Order to see the customer name in a pop-up. It makes it hard when trying to prioritize future orders. 

Thank you!

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Rob Beals

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[Evert Bos]

Rob
Your struggle sounds very familiar. A few things can be said
1.Providing the customer a delivery date when selling products from inventory , should be done using ATP. ATP can include planned orders, so it would include information you would see in net requirements. the system will always have a calculated “ATP quantity” for each date , starting today, and until the end of the ATP horizon. It will give delivery dates based on the quantity that is being sold. A physical reservation will be made when possible, if not, it will make an ordered reserved reservation (if you allow this in the Inv mgmt. parameters). If  planned orders are incluced in ATP calculation, you will not get an ordered reserved reservation because that is not possible with planned orders.
2.Net requirement screen is the typical MRP screen that has been enhanced a few years ago with customer id so we can see which customer are getting which inventory. What is missing is the customer name but that is easy to add by a developer. Yet the Net Req screen does not show whether a sales order line is physically reserved. That info is only visible in the On Hand screen on a summary level and in the “transactions” on a detailed level. You can filter on all reserved order lines, then determine whether one of those should be un-reserved to serve a more urgent sales order. AXcustomers that I know do this routinely.
3. There is an important screen “release sales order picking” screen  where the user can decide , with limited on hand, which sales orders are getting a physical reservation first, and for those order lines, the picklist is generated.  This screen requires the user to filter out somehow the less important customers, so give priority to the A customer. When this screen would be used routinely, one would not have automatic reservation turned on in the AR parameters, but selectively create the physical reservations in this screen and then immediately genereate the picking list.
4.The automatic reservation mechanism in AX creates problems for some AX customers because it works on first come first serve basis . A sales order line with a very future date, just as easily reserves physical on hand as a sales ordeline for shipment tomorrow.  Theoretically one can use “explosion” reservation which limits the making of reservations in the future and protects the on hand, saving it for the near term orders.

Ask some additional questions if you want, so I can better understand your situation

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Evert Bos
Sikich LLP
Naperville IL
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[Rob Beals]

ATP sounds like the way to go. And when we launched AX April last year, we had auto-reservations on, but it did not work out so well, and we quickly moved to manual. I’m going to look into this ATP option.

Also, the release picking work. At first glance, it seems very clunky. Some screens are painfully slow to work in, any scrolling or refreshing takes forever. I’ll need to learn about this and how to use it.

Thank you everyone for the great suggestions! This forum has proved to be very valuable.

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Rob Beals
Mermet
Cowpens SC
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[Andrew Lencsak]

I had sent to this Rob but wanted to post it for others as well:
Have you looked into using Delivery Date Control? That is an option as a parameter under Accounts Receivable, can be overridden per item in Default and Site specific order settings, or handled on a sales order or sales order line basis. It has a few different options for calculating ship dates. 1) A generic sales lead time regardless of how much inventory there is or isn’t, 2) Available to Promise (ATP) which looks at if you have on hand inventory that is available to fulfill the sales order line and if not, it calculates when you will based on all open issues and receipts, or defaults to a future date, or 3) Capable to Promise (CTP) which calculates when a make to order item could be produced by.

Net requirements is good for looking at the overall supply and demand but I would not use it for shipping, but you can get some of the stuff you ask for like Customer name through simple customizations.

There is also a form called Release sales order picking which is designed for CSRs to view which sales order lines are possible to ship based on inventory availability. It shows reservations and allows you to place reservations from that form and then create or mass release picking lists to the warehouse. This is a form available in Inventory Management and they have a similar form for transfer orders.

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Andrew Lencsak
Senior Application Consultant
eBECS
Atlanta GA
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[Tony Zeigler]

There are actually many options available 🙂
First is use of delivery date control. It takes quite a bit to setup, but used properly, you can let the system set the next possible confirmation date. For a comparison of options within delivery date control red this blog: https://stoneridgesoftware.com/sales-lead-time-vs-atp-vs-ctp-in-ax-2012/
If your using this, there is also a button at the top of the sales order’s sell tab, called Confirm Delivery Dates. It allows you to set the whole order to the same date if like.

If you decide against using any of these, and still want to attempt to have salespeople figure this out manually – I have a question for you…

If your just having them look at stocked finished goods – then just have them go to the reservations button on each salesline and reserve inventory. If they cannot reserve inventory, they cannot provide a confirm date. For predicting when enough inventory is available, you would be best to setup ATP (an option in delivery date control).

If your having them look into the BOM of the finished goods to get an entire picture of the raw materials – that’s much harder. While you could reserve the BOM lines manually, I would strongly advise looking into CTP.

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Tony Zeigler
Strategic Solutions NW, LLC
Beaverton OR
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[Rainier Joubert]

In my case it does not look like ATP takes reserved stock into consideration.
If I have 10 on hand stock all physical reserved,  ATP on a new order shows stock is available to ship

Does anyone know if this is expected behaviour from AX?

Thanks

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Rainier Joubert
IT Manager
Osborn
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