Reservations

A reservation is a link between a supply document and a demand document. For example, you can create a reservation for a demand document type of sales order against a supply document type of purchase order. The reservation creates the association between these two documents and ensures that the specified quantity of an item is available on a certain date.

Item reservations prevent picking material you previously set aside for a sales order, account, account alias, or user-defined demand. You can also create reservations for different types of supplies such as on-hand inventory or purchase orders.

You can manually create a reservation or set parameters for the application to automatically generate the reservation. You can reserve material at the subinventory, locator, and if applicable, lot and serial number level.

Once reserved, you:

• Can transfer reserved material from one demand or supply source to another.

• Can't allocate the product to another supply source or transfer the product within inventory if the reservation is to a subinventory and locator. You can do this if the reservation is at a high level.

• Can't pick reserved inventory for another demand source.

Let's look at these important aspects of reservations:

• Reservation Types

• Supply and demand source types

• Reservations with no existing demand

• Create Reservations page

Reservation Types

For on-hand inventory supply, there are two types of reservations:

• High-level reservations: contain information about the item and the organization.

• Low-level reservations: contain more detailed information about the item such as revision, lot number, subinventory, serial number, and locator.

With high-level reservations, you aren't reserving against a specific subinventory. So, issued stock can come from any available subinventory. If you want to issue material from a specific subinventory, use the Manage Reservations and Picks page to specify the subinventory details.

Note: The sales order line has a subinventory attribute and the reservation APIs honor this field if you specify the subinventory at the line level. You can change the subinventory or leave it blank.

Supply and Demand Source Types

Supply source types include:

• On hand

• Purchase order

• Internal requisition

• Transfer order

• Transfer order returns

• Work order

The demand source for reservations may be an application or user-defined transaction source type. Demand source types include:

• Account

• Account alias

• Cycle count

• Movement request

• Sales order

• Shipment request

• User defined

• Transfer order

• Work order

Note: For any supply and demand document, for example purchase order, the document number and line number identifies the item quantity to reserve.

Reservations with No Existing Demand

You can use the Manage Reservations and Picks task to create inventory reservations when you don't have an existing demand, such as a sales order or transfer order, to reserve inventory against. In these cases, you can create a user-defined, account, or account alias demand.

Here are the demand document types you can use when there is no existing demand document:

Demand Document Type	Description
User-defined demand	Use the user-defined document type when there isn't an official demand document such as a sales order or movement request. For example, you may not want to create an ad-hoc reservation against material they you may need at some future point in time.
Account alias	An account alias is an alternate name for an account number, and is used to more easily identify an account when performing a transaction. You can select an account alias as a demand source when performing a reservation. You can also select an account alias as a transaction source when performing a miscellaneous transaction.
Account	The Account demand is similar to the Account Alias. But in this case, you use the actual account number to reserve against and not the account alias.

It's important to note that you can't automate or use the picking process to relieve the user-defined, account alias, or account demand types. But, you can relieve them using the miscellaneous inventory transactions. For example, if you create a user-defined demand and reference an external document called DOC-123. Then you can perform a miscellaneous issue transaction and reference DOC-123 in the Source field when entering the transaction. After processing, the reservation relieves the user-defined demand of DOC-123 for the quantity on the miscellaneous issue transaction.

The account and account alias demand types work the same way. For example, if you create a reservation against an account demand type, you enter the account number when you create the reservation. If you then create an account miscellaneous issue transaction and use the account number in the Source field, the account reservation is relieved when you process that inventory transaction. And, the same idea holds true for the account alias demand type. But in this case, you use the account alias miscellaneous issue transaction.

Create Reservations page

Use the Manage Reservations user interface to create, view, update, transfer, and delete reservations. Use the Create Reservations page to create new reservations for a demand.

In the Demand section of the Create Reservations page, you can:

• Create user-defined demand

• Create account demand

• Create account alias demand

• Reserve automatically

In the On-Hand and Available Quantity section of the Create Reservations page:

• You can view the on-hand and available quantities for the current reservation line.

• The on-hand and available quantities change as you change the supply type, reservation quantity, or reservation levels.

• The on-hand and available quantities change as you enter new reservation rows.

To access the Create Reservations page, select the Manage Reservations and Picks task from the Inventory Management work area. On the Manage Reservations and Picks page, select the Create Reservations button. You can also select Create Reservations from the Actions menu of the Search Results section. You can select the Create Reservations action with or without completing a search and selecting a node.