How Back-to-Back Fulfillment Is Processed in Supply Planning

Use back-to-back fulfillment to improve revenues and margins by increasing on time fill rates while reducing your inventory levels. Back-to-back ordering is a special type of ordering that matches each supply order with each sales order on a one-for-one basis.

Typically, back-to-back is a purchase order matched to a sales order and cross-docked at the warehouse. Order Promising recommends a supply source and the recommendation is sent to Supply Chain Orchestration. Supply Chain Orchestration creates the supply and always creates a reservation between the supply and the sales order line.

Supply planning collects back-to-back demands and supplies, and respects the reservations between them. The planning process generates exceptions if back-to-back supplies fall short of demands or cause resource or supplier capacity overloads. Constrained supply planning generates planned supply for back-to-back orders that are missing supplies, but these planned orders can't be released from the plan. You can notify Order Management to check the order line and use Order Promising to promise the line and send the supply recommendation to Supply Chain Orchestration.

To properly plan for back-to-back orders in Supply Planning, you must define the back-to-back supply chain network.

• Set the item-organization attribute Back-to-Back Enabled to Yes in the Product Information Management work area.

• Set the item-organization attribute Planning Method to either MRP Planned or MPS Planned.

• Specify sourcing rules for the item, which tells supply planning how to:

  • Determine the ship from organization for sales orders.

  • Determine the supply sources for bringing material in to the ship from organization.

• Add the sourcing rules to the Order Promising assignment set.

• Set up your supply plan to plan for drop shipments.

  • In the Advanced Plan Options dialog box, set the Include drop ship demands and supplies attribute to Yes.

  • Optionally, select a demand schedule that represents a drop shipment forecast.