Reservation Management

This description is divided into two parts. The first part contains a general description of reservation management, which describes reservations made on the same site as that on the ordering site. The second part contains information on supply chain reservations. Supply chain reservations can be performed from a customer order against the supplying sites. In situations where a customer order has a supply code for using an internal supplier, reservations against the site that the internal supplier represents, can also be performed with the supply chain reservation process.

On-site Reservations

There are two ways of reserving material for customer orders: automatic (the system performs the reservation) and manually (the user performs the reservation). Besides these, there are specific solutions for certain scenarios, such as inherited reservations or priority reservations.

Reservations of required quantity can in addition to reserving part and quantity also be done per handling unit. As reservations are done for one demand line at a time it will only be handling units that are homogenous and contain the same part throughout the handling unit structure that is available for reservation. Having the option to reserve parts per handling unit is an option available for customer order, shipment and shop order.

Automatic Reservations

Prerequisites

The inventory parts and locations must meet the following prerequisites:

The inventory location must be a picking location. The inventory location cannot be a floor stock, a manufacturing cell, an inspection location, a shipment inventory.
The part must not be expired, i.e., the part must be current.
The inventory part might be connected to a part availability control ID (in the Inventory Part In Stock page). If so, the availability control shall allow reservations.
The inventory balance of the part at the inventory location must be higher than zero (0) after accounting for all current reservations. Note that created transport tasks can be considered as available to reserve depending on configuration on the site.

Reservation Rules

If all these prerequisites are fulfilled, the reservation functionality could use either of these priority rules depending on the setup on the site:

Earliest Expiration Date - the part is reserved at the location where the part has the earliest expiration date.
Earliest Receipt Date - the part is reserved at the location where the earliest receipts of the part has been performed.
Highest Putaway Zone Ranking - the part is reserved on locations that have the highest ranking of putaway zone for the part.
Largest Quantity on Handling Unit - the part is reserved in handling units having as large quantity as possible (intention is to reserve as few handling units as possible)
Outermost Handling Unit - the parts are reserved in handling units which have as few parents as possible - avoiding that one has to open handling unit structure at the time of picking.

Note that if handling unit optimization is used the automatic reservation will always try to reserve parts in complete handling units first regardless of the priority setting above.
It is possible to define the order of these priority rules and also skip some of them if not considered important.

In addition to this it is also possible to setup additional rules for the automatic reservation:

Skip handling unit optimization - required if a pure FIFO strategy for automatic reservation is needed.
Use date instead of date time for FIFO consideration.

If handling unit optimization is used the expiration date and receipt date will use the worst case value for the content of the handling unit.

The handling unit reservation rule to reserve as large handling units as possible also include the following:

It will only be homogenous handling units (containing only one part) that are considered
If no complete handling unit can be found, the reservation logic will then try to reserve parts not packed in handling units first and then if there still is a demand that needs to be reserved, reserve as small handling units as possible - trying to minimize the impact of breaking handling units.

Furthermore, if you use putaway zone ranking and handling unit optimization you have the option to configure an alternative putaway zone ranking to be used at reservation of complete handling units by one demand line. For instance, this implies that you can prioritize to reserve complete handling units in bulk zones prior to reserving complete handling units in the picking zone. This is enabled for certain handling unit types and the alternative ranking is entered in the putaway zone ranking.

Note: Manual reservations by the user will always have priority over the set rules.

The quantity of a customer order line or a project deliverables shipment plan line to be reserved, can be assigned to shipments as shipment lines. In other words, a shipment line is a subset of the quantity of a customer order line or a project deliverables shipment plan line . When delivering through a shipment, the reservation is also done per shipment line. This implies that the quantity of a customer order line or a project deliverables shipment plan line can be reserved in two different ways:

Per customer order line or project deliverables shipment plan line, i.e. the quantity not assigned to any shipment.
Per shipment line, i.e. the quantity assigned to a specific shipment.

The priority when reserving a customer order line is to first reserve the quantities assigned to the shipment lines, starting with the oldest shipment first, and then reserve the quantity that is not assigned to any shipment. Note that the reserved quantity viewed on the customer order line is the sum of both these ways of reserving. A reservation record is created at reservation, in order to link the customer order line or shipment line to the reserved inventory parts in stock. In this reservation record, the shipment ID is saved either as the shipment ID of the shipment line reserved, or as zero (0) when reserving a quantity not assigned to any shipment.

The reservation function with availability check in IFS/Supply Chain is based on the assumption that the customer orders will be reserved in the same order as delivered. The availability check at the order registration makes this possible.

System Results

When the automatic reservation is triggered, a reservation job is started in the background. This means that the user does not receive an immediate response as to whether the reservation has succeeded or not. The user can follow up the order lines that did not get fully reserved in the Handle Customer Order Shortages page. When the full or partial quantity does not get reserved, a shortage record is created for the part.

For customer orders, when shipment lines are automatically reserved in the shipment, the order line appears in the Handle Customer Order Shortages page depending on whether or not a shipment line can be fully reserved.

If handling unit size is given priority in the reservation logic, reservations are still made against inventory part in stock records, but the logic tries to reserve such records so that the number of handling units reserved is minimized. This is done in order to make the further material handling like picking and delivery as simple as possible.

Steering Parameters

The following parameters control how the reserve functionality works:

Shall the inventory part be availability-checked? In the Inventory Part page, you specify whether or not the part should be subject to availability checks. The system will consider the availability when a future demand will arise if the part is availability-checked at order registration, or when issued from inventory. It will also review if it is possible to meet the desired date without delaying any other orders. This means that the reservations are done according to a disposable order.
Shall created transport tasks be available to reserve? In the site you can configure if you allow to reserve from created transport tasks with destination move to inventory. When material is reserved from a created transport task by Customer Order, Material Requisition or Project Deliverables, then the system tries the best to keep the reserved material on the same transport task. This will be possible when you have complete handling units on the transport task or when the entire stock record is included on the transport task, otherwise the reserved material is removed from the transport task. To reserve from created transport tasks is beneficial as you will get less shortages due to movements within the site. In addition it is useful in order to consolidate all reservations to be moved from a bulk zone to a picking zone to the same transport task. For instance if you move a pallet from bulk zone to picking zone you want to consolidate all reservations to this pallet to minimize the number of movements.
Does the customer allow partial reservations? Indicate, in the Customer page, the backorder option preferred for the customer. This value will be the default value fetched to the customer order, where it can be changed if required. According to the option selected on the customer order, partial deliveries will be allowed for the order, order lines and incomplete package parts.

Backorder Option Selected on the Customer Order Header	System Effects
No Partial Deliveries Allowed	Partial deliveries will not be allowed. If partial quantity is, for example, manually reserved, the creation of pick list will not succeed unless the full quantity is reserved for all lines on the order. However, once the pick list is created, it is possible to pick report with differences and deliver with differences which will result in the customer order being in the Partially Delivered status.
Incomplete Lines Not Allowed	Partial deliveries of orders will be allowed but each order line needs to be complete. Pick list will be created only for completely reserved order lines. However, once the pick list is created, it is possible to pick report with differences and deliver with differences which will result in the customer order being in the Partially Delivered status.
Incomplete Packages Not Allowed	Partial deliveries of lines are allowed but package parts must be complete. If there are incomplete packages reserved, they will not be included on the pick list.
Allow Incomplete Lines and Packages	Partial deliveries of lines will be allowed, including incomplete package part lines. Pick list will be created for all reserved and partially reserved order lines for both sales and package parts.

When the Incomplete Packages Not Allowed option has been enabled, the system will only reserve components that imply full packages. If there is not enough of components to complete a package, those components will not be reserved. For example, if the ordered package part has two components and only six of ten package parts can be completed, because there is not enough of the second component, components for six package parts will be reserved, delivered and invoiced.

If the Allow Incomplete Lines and Packages backorder option has been enabled, then you can reserve and deliver incomplete package parts even though all the components are not available for creating complete packages. Even when there is not enough of all components to complete a package, the components which are available will be reserved. For example, if the ordered package part has two components and only six of ten package parts can be completed, because there is not enough of the second component, all available components for ten package parts will be reserved, delivered and invoiced.

The Allow Incomplete Packages option on the Package Part/General tab has higher priority than the backorder option enabled on the customer or customer order, i.e., even when the customer order allows the delivery of incomplete packages, if the setting on the package part does not allow incomplete packages, no incomplete packages will be reserved.

Even though the backorder option does not allow partial deliveries, you can manually connect the quantity of a source line to several shipments. For example, if you need to split into several shipments due to a transport capacity. However, in order to create a pick list for the shipment, the source order lines must be reserved.

Ways of Performing Automatic Reservation

You can reserve parts automatically in four ways: line-by-line, order-by-order, via a batch job or shipment-by-shipment. When reserving automatically the system will try to reserve the ordered quantity from the inventory location according to the reservation rules described above. For customer orders, the line-by-line reservation is performed in the Reserve Customer Order Lines page. The order-by order reservation is performed in the Reserve Customer Orders page. The batch job is performed in the Create Customer Order Reservations page. The shipment-by-shipment reservation is performed in the Shipment, Shipments and Consolidated Shipment pages. Note that any shipment lines connected to a source line will be reserved as well, when a source line is reserved via the first three ways of automatically reserving.

Batch per Site

This way of reserving best suits situations with a lot of customer order lines where material is reserved as late as possible. It consists of scheduling a job in the Create Customer Order Reservations page, that handles the reservation of many order lines and connected shipment lines as a batch. Automatic reservation implies that the user does not need to actively do anything to reserve parts.

A scheduled job is defined to run, for example, once a day, where the system will reserve, following the criteria described above, all needed material, i.e. order lines with due date equal or earlier to the current date. The result being that the reserve function will also reserve all delayed orders. In this way you need to handle only the order lines that, due to one reason or another, can not be reserved automatically.

The following day's assignments are normally ready in the morning, as the reserve function has been run overnight. The source lines that have been reserved are ready to be printed, or have already been printed. The order type in customer order and the shipment type determines where the order line and shipment line is found in the order/shipment flow. For customer orders the Handle Customer Order Shortages page will display any order that has not been reserved, regardless of the reason, together with a message indicating what stopped the order line from being reserved.

For customer orders when the availability is not sufficient and backorders are allowed with the option Allow Incomplete Lines and Packages, a fair share allocation of the quantity is performed, to distribute the quantity in a fair way. First it tries to satisfy the demands of partially delivered orders. If the quantity is still available, the system then tries to reserve the material starting with order lines with a passed due date (the older the due date the higher the priority). If the quantity is still available, subsequent reservations are made according to quantity proportions and customer priority (priority 1 is higher than 2, etc). All orders are reserved such that the order with the earliest planned ship date is reserved first.

A credit control of the customer and a full payment of advance invoices control on the customer order is performed when running the automatic reservation function.

Order-by-Order Reservation

When running the batch job per site is not suitable, the user can actively decide which specific orders to reserve and still let the automatic reservation logic determine the inventory parts in stock.

Specific orders can be reserved in the Reserve Customer Orders page. A credit control of the customer and a full payment of advance invoices control on the customer order is performed when reserving customer orders.

The same effects can also be achieved by using an order type, where the reservation is triggered immediately after releasing the customer order or printing the order confirmation.

Line-by-Line Reservation

Instead of letting the system select the order lines to reserve, the user can actively decide the specific order lines but still let the automatic reservation logic determine the inventory parts in stock.

Specific order lines can be reserved in the Reserve Customer Order Lines page. Neither credit control of the customer nor full payment of advance invoices control on the customer order is performed when reserving customer order lines.

Shipment-by-Shipment Reservation

Instead of doing the reservation for source orders and source order lines, it is possible to reserve a shipment. This can be used when you want to execute on a shipment level in order to reserve, pick, pack, deliver and close all lines of a shipment. Instead of letting shipment lines be automatically selected for reservation, the user can actively decide the specific shipment to reserve according to the automatic reservation logic.

A single shipment can be reserved in the Shipment page. Multiple shipments can be reserved in the Shipments or Consolidated Shipment pages. For customer orders, a credit control of the customer and a full payment of advance invoices control is performed when reserving shipments.

The shipment type determines if the shipment proceeds with the shipment flow after the reservation. If a shipment line is not fully reserved, the customer order line will be displayed in the Handle Customer Order Shortages page, regardless of the reason, together with a message indicating what stopped the order line from being reserved.

Manual Reservation

When reserving manually, the user chooses which source lines and shipment lines to reserve and also which parts from stock shall be reserved: choose location, serial number, lot number and even reserve parts that have expired or have a WDR number. Manual reservation of full handling units is also available as an option for customer order, shipment and shop order. It is then possible to state that certain handling units is reserved for the demand - actual reservation is then made on stock records that make up the content for those handling units. Only homogenous handling units containing one part can be reserved.

Manual reservations do not follow the prerequisites, the rules or the steering parameters of the automatic reservation.

For customer order and shipment reservations done by other sources can be seen using the Inventory Part in Stock Reservation which is available via command in the header of the Manual Reservations for Customer Order/Manual Reservations for Shipment.

The user might choose to execute manual reservations in cases of, for instance, orders with backlogs and high-priority orders. You can also decide from which inventory location the parts will be picked.

You can choose to reserve only a partial quantity when reserving manually. However handling units must be reserved as a whole. If a partial quantity of a handling is to be reserved it must be handled as a detailed reservation. Any part can only be reserved once. If some parts or order lines are backlogged, they can be picked as soon as the parts become available in stock again. Consequently, the order line may have been reserved earlier due to partial delivery, and these previously reserved parts may already have been delivered to the customer as a partial delivery. This means that reservation is also allowed for order lines with the status Picked or Partial Delivered.

When manually reserving a package part (Manual Reservations for Customer Order line and Reserve Customer Order Lines) you reserve each component separately, i.e., you are splitting the package part. In this case it is possible to deliver only components of a package.

When reserving an order line with a connected supply pegging, the reservation will replace the connected pegging and the pegged quantity will be reduced by the same quantity that was reserved. However, if there is more than one supply pegged to the same demand, you will be notified to manually adjust the pegging before the reservation can be performed.

Note that it is not possible to manually reserve from a created transport task.

Specific Scenarios

Inherited Reservation

When an order line has supply method Shop Order or Purchase Order, the parts will be automatically reserved upon receiving them into the inventory.

Priority Reservation (Instant Reservation)

You might want to reserve the materials directly at order line entry for specific parts or customer orders. Priority reservations are used in such cases. You activate this function either by applying a suitably designed order type or by setting a parameter in the inventory part record. If the full quantity cannot be reserved, the line cannot be saved.

The material is reserved following the automatic reservation functionality: parts cannot be expired and FIFO or putaway zone ranking depending on site setup. The backorder option is not followed, since the lines are saved one by one.

Reserve Customer Orders and Routes

You can make both automatic and manual reservations by route ID. You can select and reserve orders for specific routes and delivery dates. The delivery dates are calculated when the order line is recorded by using the order stop time on the route.

The standard scenario when using routes is to query for a specific route, select all lines and reserve them. If, for some reason, there is a shortage, and the order line cannot be reserved in full, there will be no recalculation of the delivery dates for the remaining quantity. The system will only provide the correct dates when the order line is entered. If you always query for a route when reserving, the order line will reappear and the remaining quantity can be reserved for the next route day.

Reservation of Exchange Components

Specific rules are valid for customer orders connected to a purchase exchange order. If a serial number and/or a lot/batch number is defined for the exchange component (on the purchase exchange order side), only that specific serial and/or batch will be available for reservation.

If no serial number or lot/batch number is defined, all parts that meet the normal criteria will be available for reservation.

Reservation of Parts in the External Service Order Flow

Specific rules are valid for customer orders connected to an external service order. If a serial number and/or lot/batch number is defined for the part to be sent for service (on the purchase order side), only that specific serial and/or batch will be available for reservation.

If no serial number or lot/batch number is defined, you will not be able to reserve any part.

Reservations in an MRO Context

To make reservations for customer order lines defined with an MRO supply code, you must use the MRO (maintenance, repair, and overhaul) process flow. You cannot manually reserve MRO customer order lines.

Reservation of Parts in Project Inventory

Project Inventory is an integral part of managing project procurement. A project owns its project inventory, ensuring that the material acquired to this project cannot be issued to fulfill other demands, either from another project or from non-project related demands. This project pegging makes it possible to distinguish between the project material and standard material. All planning tools in IFS Cloud take this distinction into account.

Supply Chain Reservations

Supply chain reservations are reservations that can be accomplished across a supply chain of internal orders between sites. The purpose is to reserve parts in advance, before the internal order flow has been executed. By doing this, you can be assured that parts are available for the external customer. To learn more about internal orders and supply chain management in IFS Cloud, read the online help file about Internal Supply Chain Execution Flow. It is not possible to make reservation per handling unit for supply chain reservations.

Supply chain reservations can be used to resolve the sourcing needs for each customer order line. Sourcing is simply a method for determining the site (external or internal) that should supply the parts on the customer order. To learn more about sourcing, read the online help file about Customer Order Sourcing.

When using supply chain reservations, keep in mind that it is possible to reserve, and thus lock, unnecessary quantities of a part. This can lead to excessive inventory levels when replenishment orders are created too early to replenish available inventory. You can avoid this situation in some cases by using normal supply and demand calculations.

Performing Supply Chain Reservations on Supply Site

The functionality for supply chain reservations is almost the same as the functionality for normal onsite reservations. The difference is that reservations are made for parts located on other sites (supply sites) than the site on which the customer order was created. You can use supply chain reservations for inventory parts on both customer order and source lines. The same inventory part number must be used on all sites in the supply chain. You can perform supply chain reservations as long as the internal customer on the supply site has not been created. It is not possible to make reservation per handling unit for supply chain reservations on supply site.

When releasing a customer order with supply chain reservations, a purchase order is created and sent to the supply site. The supply site receives the order message, creates an internal customer order that will take over the supply chain reservation to be a normal on-site reservation connected to the internal customer order.

You can perform supply chain reservations for inventory parts. When the order includes package parts, supply chain reservations can be performed on the components.

Three different types of supply chain reservation are possible:

Manual reservation: By highlighting a customer order line, using command for manual reservations, you can open the page for manual reservations and select the locations from which to reserve the parts. A specific lot/batch or serial number of the your choice also can be reserved. (This is similar to how manual reservations for onsite reservations are handled.)
Automatic reservation: By highlighting a customer order line, using the command to start an automatic reservation process, which will automatically select the locations on the supply site from which to reserve the part. (This is similar to how automatic reservations for on-site reservations are handled. The only difference between the two is that on-site automatic reservations are performed as part of the order flow.)
Instant reservation: Here the reservation on supply site will be performed as soon as the customer order line or source line is saved. The locations that are reserved are triggered by the system (in the same way as for automatic reservation). This corresponds to how priority reservations for in-site reservations is handled.

The outcome of a supply chain reservation is that a quantity of a part is physically reserved on an inventory part location.

On a customer order line, you can see which supply site the reservation has been made and what quantity of the part that has been reserved on each site. The same information can also be found on sourced lines.

Setting Up Security for Supply Chain Reservations

As part of the supply chain reservations process, you also can specify the supply sites that internal sites can use to reserve parts. In other words, you can perform a site-to-site reservation setup. This setup is done in the Site to Site Reservation Setup page. On this tab, for each supply site, you will specify the demand sites that are allowed to perform reservations there. For each site-to-site combination, you should also define the default type of supply site reservation. This default will appear on the customer order line. (A reservation type of manual reservations indicates that either manual or automatic reservations should be performed, and a reservation type of instant reservations indicates that instant reservations should be created when a customer order line is saved.)

Viewing Supply Chain Demands from Demand Sites

Other than actually reserving supply, the concept of supply chain reservations also includes the demand creation on supply sites. This means that as soon as a customer order line or source line against the supply site has been created, it will represent a future demand in the supply demand views on the supply site. This feature gives the supply site a better view into future demand so that it can plan inventory replenishment by either manufacturing or purchasing parts. When the internal order on supply site is created, it will take over the demand from the demand site.

Move Reserved Material

As soon as a quantity is reserved by any demand object it is not possible to move this quantity in the stock. This causes problems in some scenarios, and as a result quantities are moved physically but not in the application. For example you cannot move the quantity as desired from the buffer location in order to refill a picking location or from the buffer location in order to refill floor stock in manufacturing. Also there may be a need for some ad-hoc move due to repair maintenance or restructure in warehouse. Therefore in order to make warehouse operation more efficient by making it possible to move an inventory quantity even though it is reserved. Currently it is only possible to move reserved material to Customer Order, Shop Order and Work Order.