How to Delay the reservation of Sales orders
Delay the reservation of Sales orders
Objective: The objective of this document is to provide a way to delay the reservation of the sales orders until supplies are available.
This will be useful in cases where the business is in a make to Order or buy to Order scenarios but do not want to tie the supplies to an existing demand using the back to back flow.
Business use cases:
ABC Technologies is an online retailer which accepts orders from the customers. These orders are consolidated on a weekly basis and the purchase orders are placed to a supplier in Taiwan. There is a lead time of 4 weeks for the supplies to reach ABC’s warehouse. On receipt of the customer order, the order is promised based on the buy lead times.
Harry’s Supermarkets, is a small supermarket chain consisting of a central warehouse which supplies to all its retail warehouses. All replenishment requests from retail warehouses are using inventory supply requests which are enriched and fulfilled using Order Management. The sales orders arising from these supply requests are consolidated and sourced from various suppliers and fulfilled on receipt of goods from suppliers
In a standard orchestration flow, the sales order fulfilment lines move to the reservation step after scheduling. This cause the orders to go into reservation errors due to non-availability of supply. These orders then need to be recovered and the reservation step retried again.
This delay in reservation based on supply lead times, allows the business to hold off the reservation process until the goods are received, unpacked and ready for customer shipments without using advanced fulfilment techniques such as drop shipment and back to back orders
Requirement:
Delay reservation untill ‘X’ days before scheduled ship date. Where ‘X’ represents the time required to prepare items for shipping
Pre-Requisite:
Seeded orchestration flow with a Reservation Step.
Implementation:-
“Navigate to Setup and Maintenance-> Order Management-> Manage Orchestration Process Definitions”
Search for a seeded orchestration process flow to make changes. In this case we will customize the seeded ShipOrderGenericProcess
Click on the “Create Duplicate” icon to create a new process
Give a logical name to the process
Click on the “+” sign after the Schedule step to add a new step for waiting
Click on the “Pause Rule”
Create a timer based pause rule as shown below, in this example we are pausing the orchestration step until 3 days before Scheduled Ship date
Validate the process definition
Release and Deploy the process
Assign the process as required.
Example of an order which is on this wait
Note: the scheduled release date is automatically populated
Conclusion:-
In this example we have seen the ability to delay the reservation of sales orders for a business use case using simple pause step. Oracle fusion order management gives us a powerful orchestration framework which can be tailored to various business scenario’s such as scheduling, reservation, calling an external application for fulfilment, credit check, trade compliance etc.
There are many advanced fulfilment techniques which are available to achieve this requirement such as drop-shipment or back-back fulfilment. It is up to the implementation consultant to evaluate the pro’s and con’s of each option vis a vis the additional setups, maintenance etc and suggest a business appropriate solution which delivers most value with least cost.
About Author:-
Harish Shanthinikethanam is an SCM Consultant with over 14 years of experience in Oracle ERP both on-prem and cloud. He has been a part of multiple implementation projects across various geographies and industries