Understanding Future Availability Dates

You can use an effective date to indicate the future availability of a lot. For example, in the wine industry, a certain type of wine may need to ferment for 600 days before it is sellable to the winery's distributors or to customers. In this case, the effective days for the batch of wine is 600 days. If you work with conformance lots that require acceptable quality assurance testing before becoming available, the inventory can be held with a future availability date.

Future availability dates enable you to know information such as:

• The quantity of finished goods that are expected from work order completions.

• The quantity of purchased goods from purchase orders.

• The quantity of inventory that is currently committed to sales and work orders.

• The quantity of inventory that is available for commitment to new sales and work orders.

With this information, you can negotiate realistic delivery dates for sales orders by calculating the expected quantity available and accounting for commitments on existing on-hand inventory.

Note: For a lot to be considered available by the system, the effective date must be the current or a past date, and the lot must not have a hold code associated with it. You can remove a lot status code either manually or automatically using the Hold Expired Lots (R41082) or Update Effective Lots (R41083) programs.

You can view or override a lot's effective date in these programs:

• Lot Master (P4108)

• Inventory Adjustments (P4114)

• Item Reclassifications (P4116)

• Work Order Completions (P31114)

• Work Order Process Resource Revisions (P3111P)

• Work Order Inventory Issues (P31113)

• Co/By Product Completion Window (P31115)

• Manufacturing Work Order Processing (P48013)

• Purchase Orders (P4310)

• PO Receipts (P4312)

• MRP/MPS Detail Message Revisions (P3411)

• Supply and Demand Inquiry (P4021)

• MPS Time Series (P3413)

The system uses the F4108 table to store and process effective dates.