Sales order confirmation
Make promises you can keep
Sales orders are automatically confirmed during their creation and re-confirmed when changing them. In a straight forward situation only available stock is considered to confirm against. If production orders or even (scheduled) planned orders are considered as relevant supply when confirming sales orders, the production schedule must be realistic. But also more challenging requirements are possible
Reserve supply for certain customers
A requirement could be to reserve supply for specific customers or customer groups. In this case, a sales order can only consume supply which has been reserved for this particular customer or customer group to which this customer belongs. Big sales orders for one customer (group) which come in early cannot consume all available supply but only available supply reserved for this customer (group). These reservations can either be generated from the original demand plan or from the planned supply. The latter case heavily leans on correct pegging information between supply and demand.
Consider alternative locations and products
Another requirement could be to consider available supply in locations (distribution center or plant) other than the preferred location. In case the requested supply is not available in the preferred location, but only in an alternative location, the possibility exists to automatically generate stock transfer requisitions between the two plants instead of waiting for the next supply planning process. Execution steps related to the sales order can immediately start.
Another example of a more advanced sales order confirmation process is to confirm an alternative product when there is no available supply for the requested product on the requested date.
