Enforce Minimum Remaining Shelf Life in Order Fulfillment

Capture minimum remaining shelf-life requirements from order promising and enforce them during order fulfillment through Inventory and Shipping.

Get these benefits

• Improve customer satisfaction. Ensure customers receive products with sufficient usable shelf life for resale, processing, or consumption.
• Reduce returns and claims. Prevent non-compliant inventory from being promised or shipped, lowering returns, credit notes, penalties, and disputes.
• Strengthen compliance. Apply contractual, regulatory, customer, and market-specific shelf-life requirements consistently.

How it works

To use this feature, you start by enabling the Specify Minimum Shelf-Life Controls for Perishable Items feature in the Manufacturing and Supply Chain Material Management offering. Then you define the minimum remaining shelf-life rules using the Configure Remaining Shelf Life Rule set up task.

The shelf-life rules can be assigned at multiple levels, such as item and customer, or item, customer, and customer site or item and organization.

When an eligible sales order line is promised, Global Order Promising evaluates minimum remaining shelf life and lot-expiration constraints while checking availability and scheduling shelf-life-sensitive products. It then calculates the applicable minimum remaining shelf life attributes based on the minimum remaining shelf life rules.

One of the key attributes is Minimum Remaining Shelf Life Days from Ship Date, which is calculated as the specified Minimum Remaining Shelf Life Days as set up in the rule, plus the difference between the scheduled arrival date and the scheduled ship date. This value represents the shelf-life requirement relative to the scheduled ship date and is used across Global Order Promising, Backlog Management, Order Management, Supply Chain Orchestration, Inventory, and Shipping.

Order Management passes the Minimum Remaining Shelf Life Days from Ship Date value to Inventory for reservations and to Shipping for shipment lines. The value is recalculated whenever an order change triggers rescheduling of the order line. If Global Order Promising returns a revised value during rescheduling, Order Management propagates the updated value to the associated reservation and shipment line.

When you split an order line manually or if a line is split because of a partial fulfillment of ordered quantity, the value of Minimum Remaining Shelf-Life Days from Ship Date gets copied to the split line as well. However, minimum remaining shelf life applies only to outbound order lines. Therefore, the value is neither calculated nor populated for referenced or unreferenced return lines.

You can add the Minimum Remaining Shelf-Life Days from Ship Date attribute to the order line on the Redwood order page. The attribute is hidden by default.

For more details on setting up minimum remaining shelf-life rules, you can refer to the What’s New content for the SCM Common feature Specify Minimum Shelf-Life Controls for Perishable Items in this release.

Steps to enable and configure

To use this feature in Order Management, you will opt in to the Specify Minimum Shelf-Life Controls for Perishable Items feature in the Manufacturing and Supply Chain Material Management offering.

Tips and considerations

1. Minimum remaining shelf life is not supported for drop shipment flows. Global Order Promising does not calculate minimum remaining shelf life when the supply source is a supplier and supplier site.
2. Minimum remaining shelf life values are computed by Global Order Promising based on rules. You cannot specify or modify a value for minimum remaining shelf life using the Sales Orders for Order Hub REST API or the Redwood order page. The attribute Minimum Remaining Shelf Life Days from Ship Date on the order line in the Redwood order page, is a read-only attribute.
3. The Minimum Remaining Shelf Life Days from Ship Date value can change when an order line is rescheduled. This may occur when changes to the order data cause a different rule to apply; for example, changing the customer ship-to site on the order line may result in a different minimum remaining shelf life rule being evaluated.

Key resources

• Implementing Order Management
• Using Order Management
• Specify Minimum Shelf-Life Controls for Perishable Items 
• Respect Minimum Shelf-Life Material Constraints in Order Promising 

Access requirements

No new access privileges have been introduced in Order Management as part of this feature.

Users who are assigned a configured job role that contains these privileges can manage and view minimum remaining shelf life rules:

• Manage Remaining Shelf-Life Rules (MSC_MANAGE_REMAINING_SHELF_LIFE_RULES_PRIV)
• View Remaining Shelf-Life Rules (MSC_VIEW_REMAINING_SHELF_LIFE_RULES_PRIV)