For companies who maintain perpetual inventory, inventory allocation is an important business process area to track. Understanding the relationship between supply and demand, and having the systemic tools to manage this, is critical to ensuring the company is able to meet customer needs. This involves making sure you not only have the required supply, but that you are able to have the required supply when the customer needs it. Fortunately, NetSuite provides the Supply Allocation feature which, when configured, can help you match both existing and future supply to customer demand. Let us take a look at how this works.
Supply Allocation Setup
For this blog, we will be focusing on providing a high-level overview of the feature. In my experience, Supply Allocation can support simple use cases, or more complex ones. Supply allocation can be enabled as follows:
- Navigate to Setup > Company > Enable Features.
- Go to the Items & Inventory
- Check the Supply Allocation
- Ensure the Multi-Location Inventory box is checked.
- Save.
When you first enable it, NetSuite will perform a data migration check. These typically go well, however be sure to escalate any issues to NetSuite support. Once the data check is successful, you can check the Supply Allocation box again which will officially enable the feature.
Benefits of Supply Allocation
At a high-level, the supply allocation feature offers several benefits compared to the standard allocation model in NetSuite. Including but not limited to:
- The ability to link both existing and future supply from Purchase Orders, Work Orders, or Inbound Shipments to open Demand such as Sales Orders, Transfer Orders, or other Work Orders.
- The ability to define allocation periods, which enable you to control what supply is allocated.
- For example, you can create an allocation strategy that will enable you to allocate sales orders with future ship dates to purchase orders with future receipt dates. This can help you maintain the availability of existing stock to meet sales orders with earlier ship dates.
- The ability to create order reservations for specific customers or sales channels.
- Use of Available to Promise, to help you predict supply availability.
- Automated allocation and reallocation based on Supply Required by Date.
Key Supply Allocation Fields: A Spotlight on Essential Elements
Supply Allocation introduces several important fields that are used to drive supply allocation behavior. We won’t cover the full breadth of the supply allocation feature and variables in this blog, but a few key fields to keep in mind are:
- Supply Required by Date
- This is a line-level field on Sales Orders. Think of this as the traditional “Ship Date” field, except at the line-level. This field is important as it can drive initial allocation and any reallocation. The field is also used to alert you when supply will not be available by the supply required by date. This field can be set by the order entry person, or by script.
- Expected Ship Date
- This is a line-level field on Sales Orders. This read-only field is automatically set by the Supply Allocation engine based on when supply will be on-hand and ready to ship.
- Expected Receipt Date
- This is a line-level field on Purchase Orders. Supply Allocation uses this field to determine when inventory will be received.
- Expected Delivery Date
- This is a header-level field on Inbound Shipments. If specified, this takes precedence over the Expected Receipt Date field on the Purchase Order.
Other additional areas to consider are allocation strategies, order allocation schedules, order reservations, and the commitment confirmed box. While we will not be able to cover all those settings here, the various settings here provide a multitude of configuration options to help support your unique business needs and meet any challenges head on.
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