Is anyone using Supply Allocation? We have a scheduled reallocation that runs once a night. There is an issue on items in a picked status where NetSuite is reallocation the items to different orders un-committing quantities on fulfilled (picked) orders and reallocating to other orders. Side note we’ve seen this when using inventory adjustments or inventory transfers causing issues with Fulfillments still in a picked status. I surprised the items are not firmed once the fulfillment is created. Am i missing something?

no answer, but watching. So far I have found extremely little info on supply allocation and am having trouble getting answers. I think we are the beta testers.

@Dave Furman, we’ve solved most issues that have come up. Let me know if you have any question on anything

Thanks! I’ll shoot a few at you here--its a bit of a brain dump so I apologize, but if you or anyone recognizes anything here and has found a solution I am all ears! So far no one I have been able to ask has really provided any answers…have not found any consultants that come recommended to help either. I’ve spoken with a couple friends at other companies that are installing supply allocation and everyone seems pretty uniformly frustrated with the function. I am trying to use what I thought was the most basic form of order and supply management, which until recently I had taken for granted as the way all such systems work--I want to to allocate future supply to future-ship-date sales orders as late as possible so we hold inventory for future sales orders from future deliveries, while leaving stock on hand as free as possible to make new at-once sales, and do this as simply and automatically and in real-time as possible. Issues I am having in no particular order: 1. supply required by dates on order lines default to order entry date, not ship date as it should be for the function to work. As I understand it this requires either scripting to fix this problem, or manually changing the SRB date on every line of every order with a future ship date. How have you addressed this? 2. I am unclear if the supply allocation function looks at the expected receipt date of the PO line item for a sku on an inbound shipment, or if it looks at the expected receipt date on the inbound shipment header. It would certainly make life easier if once an item is on an inbound shipment the supply allocation would use this date (or if this date would populate the ERD on the PO line). Is this something you have had to deal with? 3. Sales orders do, but reservation orders do not automatically re-allocate away from stock on hand after a new supply PO is placed--it seems to require entirely deleting and re-writing reservation orders if this becomes an issue. Since Reservation Orders are only possible for 1 sku at a time (which is asinine if you ask me, and another significant problem making these virtually non-functional for our use) this means re-writing sometimes hundreds of reservations at a time. It makes me question what circumstances reservation orders are practical at all--have you used them, and if so are there any best practices you have found to eliminate or reduce some of these pain-points? 4. We have several major customers that stock hundreds of sku’s, and work off of a 6-month long monthly forecast, the expectation is that we’ll have supply reserved for them and they can draw it down via their weekly PO’s. We cant really change this, it’s just how that industry works. In other ERP systems I have used a blanket-order system for this, which handles this very cleanly--that’s basically an order reservation, but it looks more like a sales order in that you can enter as many sku’s as you like, and as it is out-paced or cancels, inventory automatically draws from, or goes back into, a general inventory locations without requiring hands-on “management”. Because reservation orders only allow 1 sku at a time, using reservation orders would require thousands of reservation orders and seems like too much of a capacity bottleneck to manage, in additon to the reallocation issues I mentioned above. Have you had a situation like this, and if so how have you dealt with this? We were trying to avoid creating multiple inventory locations to deal with it, but that’s the only way I can think of to avoid this problem. 5. regardless of my allocation strategy, once a demand order taps into stock on hand, it sometimes seems to take ALL of the stock on hand and only then start using future supply--I need it in all cases to take future supply first, and only take the absolute minimum from stock on hand. Have you found this and found a way around it?

@Dave Furman sorry for the delay. 1. We added a custom field in the headed that then populates each line item using a client script. 2. We decided not to use inbound shipments but I do know Supply Allocation will look at the delivery date of the Inbound Shipment. The supply transaction will show as the inbound shipment 3. Unfortunately we do not use order reservations 4. I cannot speak to this situation 5. That doesn’t sound like you strategy is working correctly. It should take all future supply as it can, as long as it’s on time, and then consume available inventory. That is how our system is currently working

Thanks, appreciate your reply very much. (and apologies for the rant!)