Dilemma of Supply Chain Planning in an Allotment scenario - 4
In continuation with earlier blogs, we had an interesting set of conversations in the past one month within the project team. One of the ideas through the brainstorming and subsequent brain-streamlining session, was to provide capability in the tool to store realtime Allotment limits in the sales order. An interesting revelation was that one could arrive at this figure only if we use another parameter called the Checking Horizon.
While one set of the business was not keen on this parameter, the other was absolutely bought over this idea. A Checking Horizon provides a realistic supply chain feasible date by when a sales order can be fulfiled especially in a supply-constrained situation.
In our solution design, we took a decision to do Allotment Check prior to Availability Check. One reason we took this decision was to confine allotment consumption to a time bucket when the material availability of a Sales Order is checked. Availability check happens as a second distinct step completely agnostic to allotment consumption that happened in first step.
A Checking Horizon thus makes possible for any remnant allocation to be consumed completely.Thus it is possible for tracking allocation consumed, remaining and the limit of allocation at any given point in time. This capability is lost when Checking Horizon is not configured.
Although we are yet to decide where we finally want to go, it looks quite likely that Checking Horizon is a useful parameter to drive the correct demand visible to the planning solution - which is the objective of one of the best-in-class supply chains.
