Assignments and Rules

You can create assignment sets, sourcing rules, available-to-promise rules, and allocation rules to tell Promising how to promise a fulfillment line.

Note

1. You use an assignment set to answer:
   • What sourcing rule should I use?
   • Should I assign my sourcing rule to one item, one customer, one organization, all items, all customers?

     You can assign a sourcing rule to different levels of detail, such as to Items, Customers, Organizations, Categories, Regions, and many more levels.

2. You use a sourcing rule to answer:
   • What sources should I use? Should I source from the entire supply chain, or only parts of it?

     You can source from suppliers, factories, warehouses, and distribution centers.

3. You use an ATP Rule to answer:
   • What should I search?
   • Only lead times, the entire supply chain, only parts of it, or none of it?

     You can search according to transit lead times, manufacturing lead times, calendars, historical build data, and more.

4. You use an allocation rule to answer:
   • Should I prioritize the supply that I have?
   • Should I prioritize one customer over another, one region over another, or in some other way?

You can allocate supply according to a number, percent, or ratio.

Consider an example. Assume you make the AS54888 at your M1 factory, and you sell it to your Computer Service and Rentals customer.

Here's how it works.

1. You create a sales order in the Order Management work area that has the AS54888 in the Item attribute, and Computer Service and Rentals in the Customer attribute. Order Management sends a request to Promising to promise the order.
2. Promising uses the assignment set that you create in the Global Order Promising work area to identify the sourcing rule it will use to source the item. For this example,
   • You set the assignment level to Item and Customer to focus the assignment.
   • You specify the customer and item on the set.
   • You specify the sourcing rule to use so Promising knows which source it must use to fulfill the item.

   Promising will use this assignment set only if the customer and item that you specify on the assignment set match the customer and item from the fulfillment line.

3. Promising uses the sourcing rule that you create to identify the source it must use to promise the item. In this example, you specify to make it in the M1 factory.
4. Promising uses the ATP rule that you create to determine when the item will be available to promise. Assume you specify to use lead time to determine availability. You know from historical data that it takes 5 days to build the item, and 3 days transit time to ship it.
5. Order Management sends the request to promise on 03/01/22 and today is 03/01/22. Promising calculates that it has 8 days to deliver the item to Computer Service and Rentals, so it sends a promised arrival date of 03/09/22 to Order Management. This means it will get there 6 days before the requested arrival date, and your customer will be happy.

This is just one simple example of how you can set up promising. You can set up different types of rules and assign them in different ways to items and organizations so you can apply different promising logic for different items. You actually have a wide range of promising possibilities that you can set up.