SAP Business One – Strategies for better ERP Inventory Management

SAP Business One Inventory Allocation is an area that users look to us at Third Wave to help them define process and set up the system to handle. Most businesses will encounter a stock-out scenario and have to backorder customer order(s). When faced with this scenario the ability to fulfill orders that either have contractual obligations or choosing customers based on criteria becomes important. For example, if you have an order from a major customer like Walmart or Target but you also have an order from your website and your available to promise goes negative but you can fulfill some but not all of the orders. ERP for inventory management can help prevent this situation.

SAP Business One has available to promise information on ERP for inventory management but does not provide hard-allocation functionality. This makes handling back-orders and determining order fulfillment difficult. It causes the overall customer and employee experience to become stressed.

Auto or Manual Allocations

Third Wave has implemented stock allocation at various importer/distributors and delivered various functionality of the allocation tools. Following are examples of how we delivered SAP Business One Inventory Allocation:

• A mechanism on sales order lines to allow either auto or manual allocation. Allocate stock based on a requested hierarchy (e.g., first come first served, customer requested date, customer priority plus other timeframes, or other – it’s simply a sort). A threshold can be set to exclude (e.g., orders set to ship later than xx days in the future).
• When orders are set to auto allocate, all sales order entry and updates along with any SAP transaction that affects inventory will attempt to hard allocate stock to order lines based on the priority specified above. Basically, one side of the equation is open unallocated order lines set to auto allocate. The other is stock available to allocate. The process runs automatically during any transaction update to take available stock quantities and apply to order lines and stop either when all orders have allocations OR all available has been allocated. It’s the key to ERP for inventory management.
• If an order line is set for manual allocation, there is a screen that can be run by item code to allow a user to hard allocate planned inbound Purchase Order lines to Sales Order line(s). If this is done, receipt of the Purchase Order will automatically change the inbound PO allocation to a stock allocation. This screen does allow for mass reallocation changes by item code.

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