Process: Allocate and backorder inventory

Flow

Legend

Allocate and backorder inventory

Objective

Allocate items that need allocation, and backorder those for which no inventory is available.

Description

Allocate specified order items from existing inventory, and obtain a fulfillment center and an estimated shipping offset for each order item.

If the specified quantity of order items is not available in existing inventory, backorder (allocate from expected inventory) specified order items and obtain a fulfillment center as well as an estimated availability time and shipping offset for each order item.

This process supports inventory management for managing customer expectations as to when the items that were ordered will be available. Available items will now be allocated to the order, thus committing inventory to the order. Items that are not available now but are expected to be available in the future will be backordered (soft allocated against expected inventory).

The process takes an order requiring inventory allocation as input and determines whether or not there are line items that require allocation. An item requires allocation if it is not allocated or it is allocated but the fulfillment center, the quantity, or the ship-to address has changed since it was last allocated. A list of eligible fulfillment centers is determined for each item that is to be allocated. Using the list of fulfillment centers, a check is made to see whether or not the item is available now in the quantity requested. If it is not available now, a check is made against the expected inventory and the fulfillment center with the earliest available date is used. If there is no expected inventory, a default date set at the store level will be used as the estimated availability date for the backorder. Another store-level default is used as the maximum time in the future to which an estimated available date for a backorder can be set.

Attributes can be set for items that control the allocation and backorder process:

Inventory tracking
when set, this indicates that inventory is tracked and that checking against inventory received and expected will be performed; if not set, the inventory is assumed to be freely available.
Force backorder
when set, this implies that the item should be backordered whether there is sufficient inventory in stock or not. This may be useful when there is a quality-control issue and nothing is to be shipped out until it is resolved.
Backorderable
when set, this implies that the item can be backordered; if not set, the item is not allowed to be backordered. This could be used for items that would not be restocked. For instance, clothing of a particular style may not be reordered when the inventory runs out.

The process output is one of the following:

Features

Inventory allocation

Customization

Edition

Professional, Business Edition

Subprocesses

Tasks

Task Description Role
Backorder from expected inventory

Allocate expected inventory for a particular order item at a particular fulfillment center.

The behavior of the command is as follows:

-- If the order item is suitable for backordering (that is, its inventory-status attribute specifies unallocated) and there is sufficient expected inventory at one of the specified fulfillment centers (searching in order from first to last in the list of input fulfillment centers) to completely backorder the quantity needed by the order item, backorder it and update the order item to reflect the backorder.

-- Otherwise, the order item is not changed.

Note: In the default implementation, expected ship date is computed by looking at both expected inventory receipts and expected inventory records as well as at store policy for how long it takes to fulfill an item once an order is placed.

Alternatively, allocation may be allowed from certain fulfillment centers even when there are no inventory records or expected inventory records available at that fulfillment center (as if there was an expectation of infinite inventory for certain stores at certain fulfillment centers) as long as the item is not discontinued. For such unlimited-supply fulfillment centers, the estimated availability time is derived from the policy represented by the Store.defaultBackorderOffset attribute.

System

Business artifacts

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