Flexible Allocations from Demand Plan

The company in this project grouped customers in A, B and C and products into make-to-stock (MTS) and make-to-order (MTO), resulting in six allocation groups. Group A customers for MTS products shared the same reservation etc. In this way it is prevented for example that an early sales order from a B customer for an MTO product consumes supply reserved for A customers and MTO products. These detailed reservation buckets are suitable when supply is restricted; overall demand and supply approximately match or when demand exceeds supply. However, in times when available supply (capacity) exceeds demand, there was no need for detailed protection. A solution was developed to transfer to bigger reservation groups like only based on the customer groups or only based on the product groups resulting in less reservation groups. This prevented unnecessary (initially) unconfirmed sales orders and manual reservation swaps. When demand picked up again, the company could go back to the more detailed reservation buckets, giving them more control on the allocation of scarce supply to the various customer/product groups.