Reservations

A reservation is made after an order has been assigned to a facility. The reservation reserves an existing or future stock for a customer. If no stock is available, the reservation is saved and assigned to a suitable stock as soon as one becomes available.

Making reservations

A reservation is made after an order has been placed or a delivery promise has been made to a customer. Multiple reservation criteria need to be met for (expected) stock to be considered for a reservation:

• The stock must be pickable and accessible. This means the stock must be placed on a pickable location that's not locked. Stocks have both traits pickable and accessible, by default. See the inventory traits article for more information on setting traits.

• The available until date must not be exceeded. If a stockAvailableUntil is configured in the listing, the corresponding stock has an available until date. The available until date on the stock will default to the expiry date in the stock properties if nothing else is specified. The date must be later than now or later than the delivery date specified in the order.

• The stock's arrival date must be before the latest point in time at which order picking can start. If the stock hasn't arrived at the facility yet, the requested date specified in the corresponding purchase order must be earlier than the latest time when picking can start.

• The stock must not be part of a delayed delivery. Only expected stock from purchase orders with requested dates greater than the current date are considered. If the requested date is in the past, we classify the delivery as delayed and consider it too risky to place (further) reservations on its stock.

When a reservation is placed on expected stock, it will be allocated from the delivery with the latest possible arrival date.

Redistributing reservations

After a reservation has been assigned to an (expected) stock, fulfillmenttools continuously ensure that the reservations can still be fulfilled. If reservations can't be fulfilled anymore, fulfillmenttools will try to redistribute them to stock that meets the reservation criteria. Reservations are always verified and redistributed (if necessary) if there are updates on an (expected) stock. Only time-triggered changes are currently not considered when redistributing reservations.

This covers the following cases, among others:

• Stock is deleted.

• Stock becomes non-pickable: This could mean the stock was relocated within the facility to a location without the "pickable" trait.

• Stock becomes non-accessible: This could mean the stock was relocated within the facility to a location without the accessible trait.

• Expected stock arrival date changes: If users are notified of changes to a delivery's arrival date, we recommend adjusting the requested date in the purchase order. This will trigger a check to ensure that all reservations can still be fulfilled.

• Expected stock quantity changes: If users are notified of changes to the requested items in a delivery, we recommend updating the requested items in the purchase order. This will trigger a check to ensure that all reservations can still be fulfilled.

• The purchase order is canceled.

Reservations for expected stock whose delivery is delayed aren't automatically reassigned. Users are expected to update the requested date or cancel the purchase order if reservations should be redistributed.

If the stock expires and/or reaches its available until date, reservations aren't automatically reassigned. Users are expected to mark expired stock as non-pickable, non-accessible, or delete it completely.

Removing reservations

By default, reservations are removed after the respective pick job is closed. In addition, the reserved stock configuration allows explicitly specifying the event after which the reservation and the reserved stock are to be removed.

If the stock is initially to be marked as outbound stock after picking and then removed at a later date (together with the reservation), the outbound stock configuration can be used.

If no operational entities (such as pick jobs or handover jobs) are used within a facility, reservations can be removed via the REST API.

For more information on removing reservations via API, refer to Developer Docs – Reservations.

Over-reservations

If no stock is currently available, reservations are saved and assigned to suitable stock as soon as a stock item meeting the reservation criteria becomes available.

Over-reservations are displayed in the stock overview in Backoffice together with all other reservations. If there are over-reservations in a facility, the user is notified via an info icon and tooltip.