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[Janine Breton]

We are currently on AX2012.  Our delivery date controls are set using ATP.  We use the sales order “confirm ship date” function to update our sales orders to reflect any late purchase order receipts or changes. So potentially, we have sales orders with a future “requested” date because an item is on backorder,  and a future “confirmed” date.  When we get an early purchase order receipt, we would like to go ahead and ship the sales orders immediately now that the inventory is available.  However, they do not print because they still have the future confirmed ship date.  I cannot find a method to adjust the sales order except for manually updating each individual sales order back to today’s date so it can ship. Has anyone else run into this and found a method?  We don’t want to hand adjust hundreds of orders when this happens.
Thank you for your insights,
Janine

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Janine Breton
Business and Reporting Analyst
America’s Gardening Resource
Burlington VT
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[Andrew Lencsak]

Hi Janine,
I’ve had a few customers with a similar issue and I have seen some different scenarios for this. Is there criteria other than ship date you can use like Customer classification group or Priority? Are you using Warehouse management or traditional WMS?

What is you S&OP process? Do you use marking to pre-reserve inventory or mark a Purchase order to a Sales order? If so, then once receive, those lines become physically reserved and you could release orders for shipping based on what is reserved?

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Andrew Lencsak
Arbela Technologies
Nashua NH
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[Janine Breton]

Oh yes, good questions Andrew.  
We are not using the warehouse management.  We are a direct to consumer company so have thousands of SKUs in and out that could be backordered at any time we run out of inventory so no special classifications.  We are not reserving or marking inventory, just using ATP to allocate Purchase order or on-hand inventory availability to the SO.  Everything is an on-order issue.  We are using the call center module to book sales orders, standard receiving and put away of arrivals from the Arrival Overview.  Nothing fancy.  Hope this gives better insights.
thank you
jmb

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Janine Breton
Business and Reporting Analyst
America’s Gardening Resource
Burlington VT
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[Andrew Lencsak]

Thanks for the quick reply. It is a tricky scenario because you want to effectively update the ship date but the system needs to know which orders you would want to update the ship date on, so basically re-run ATP across all open orders of an item simultaneously to give them updated ship dates then release orders by ship date.

There is nothing standard that would do it. For certain clients I have built mods to unreserve inventory from all sales orders then re-reserve based on the line ship date. So basically, we did not update or re-confirm the ship date, we just reserved based on the earliest ship dates and would remove reservations nightly in the case newer orders came in that were higher priority. However, for that customer, they were not using ATP.

You can always ship an order earlier than the ship date as long as you know which orders you want to ship, i.e. based on available inventory/ship date/customer etc. The system will still allow you to ship it even if the date is in the future, you just have to consider which parameters are relevant when releasing so you’re not accidentally releasing some orders from that list of hundreds that you do not want to ship. Even with a modification to help update the dates on those orders, there would need to be some criteria for knowing which dates to update. That is one reason I asked about marking as in those cases the PO and SO are distinctly tied together. But if I had 2 sales orders let’s say demand for 50 units each, both with ship dates of 2 weeks out and I have a PO coming in for 80 on this Thursday, do I update just one SO line’s ship date since the other could only be partially fulfilled? And which one should be updated if the both currently have the same ship date.

I think you would have to have a process with a workaround even if you modified the system slightly to aid you

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Andrew Lencsak
Arbela Technologies
Irvine CA
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[Janine Breton]

Thank you for taking the time to give your input Andrew.  It does confirm my suspicions.  We have an idea of a simple mod to the confirmed ship dates function but trying to avoid.  I’ll keep working with ATP to see what we can accomplish first.
Best regards,

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Janine Breton
Business and Reporting Analyst
America’s Gardening Resource
Burlington VT
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[Tony Zeigler]

?We may want to look into why the requested date got moved out in the first place.
From the delivery date control mechanism’s perspective, that date represents when a customer wants something delivered. If they are a construction site, and you ship early, there may be no one there to receive it.
It sounds like you have moved the requested date out because that’s when you could promise it – something that I often see done in the interest of meeting on-time metrics.
I like to keep requested as what the customer wanted – realistic or not – and let confirmed date represent what you’ve been able to promise.

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Tony Zeigler
Senior Consultant
Strategic Solutions NW, LLC
Beaverton OR
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[Andrew Lencsak]

One option could be to use Master planning Action messages to look at suggested Sales order dates that can be pulled in. You could run MRP after the receiving process to show which orders may be able to be fulfilled early then apply the Actions to update the ship dates.

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Andrew Lencsak
Arbela Technologies
Nashua NH
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[Paul Martin]

I do think that based upon what I have read here, you are probably looking at a mod like Andrew is talking about. you basically would have to unreserve and then based upon some criteria you could set in the mod run a new confirmation based upon some priorities.

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Paul Martin
Production Program Manager
Elite Comfort Solutions, LLC
Rutherfordton NC
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[Trent Aschliman]

Not sure of your BI situation, but a report for on hand inventory by sales order line may help guide you to those orders ready for shipment early.  Helps prevent a mod.

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Trent Aschliman
McWane, Inc.
Birmingham AL
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