Avoiding Quantity Mismatches when Committing Numbered Inventory

For numbered items, you track the inventory’s available quantity across locations and across lot or serial numbers. Inventory reallocation and partial fulfillments may cause inconsistencies when tracking these available quantities. Inconsistencies may persist until you completely fulfill an order.

Inventory Management provides tools that enable you to prevent these inconsistencies during order creation or entry. Consider the following best practices to maintain consistent available quantities for numbered inventory:

• Assign lot or serialized numbers as soon as you commit quantities to an order.

  If you allocate inventory to order lines during order entry, make sure that you also enter the lot or serial numbers before you save the order.

  Without assigning lot or serial numbers to an order, the quantity committed is decreased from the available quantity tracked for the item’s location only. Inconsistency occurs until you assign lot or serial numbers to the item fulfillment. To apply a corresponding decrease in the available quantity of the lot or serial numbers, assign them to the order as well.

• Commit inventory to an order only when the lot or serial numbers have been added.

  To implement this guideline, consider disabling automatic commitment. Instead, you can create recurring Commit Orders Schedules or Order Allocation Schedules that would pick up only order lines in which lot or serial numbers have been assigned. On your schedules, you can set up a saved search that provides a specific list of orders to be allocated. For more information, see Committing Orders.

  To create schedules, see Creating Commit Orders Schedule or Creating Order Allocation Schedules.

• When you add order lines for numbered inventory, check the Commitment Confirmed box. When you define a Commit Orders Schedule or Order Allocation Schedule, check the Set Order Line Firm box.

  These settings prevent order lines from being reallocated, consequently, keeping available quantities from being out of sync.

General Notices