Reservations

Introduction

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

Making reservations

A reservation is made after an order has been placed or a delivery promise has been made to a customer. There are multiple reservation criteria that need to be met for a stock to be considered for a reservation:

• The stock must be pickable & accessible. This means the stock must be placed on a pickable location which is not locked. Stocks have both traits pickable & accessible by default. Go here 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 has to be larger than now or larger than the delivery date specified in the order.

• The arrival date of the stock must be before the latest point in time when the order picking can be started. If a stock has not arrived in the facility yet, the requestedDate which is specified in the corresponding purchaseOrder must be smaller than the latest point in time when the picking can be started.

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

Redistributing reservations

After a reservation has been assigned to an (expected) stock, our systems constantly ensure that the reservations can still be fulfilled. If reservations cannot be fulfilled anymore our systems will try to redistribute the reservations on stocks meeting the reservation criteria. This covers the following cases, among others:

• Stock is deleted

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

• Stock becomes non-accessible: This could mean that the stock was relocated within the facility and put on a location without the "accessible" trait.

• Expected stock's arrival date changes: If users are notified about changes of the arrival date of a delivery, we recommend to adjust the requestedDate in the purchaseOrder. This will lead to a check, ensuring that all reservations can still be fulfilled.

• Expected stock's quantity changes: If users are notified about changes of the requested items in a delivery, we recommend to adjust the requestedItems in the purchaseOrder. This will lead to a check, ensuring that all reservations can still be fulfilled.

• Purchase order is cancelled

Reservations on expected stock whose delivery is delayed are not reassigned automatically. Users are expected to update the requestedDate or cancel the purchase order if reservations should be re-distributed.

If a stock expires and/or reaches its available until date, reservations are not automatically re-assigned. Users are expected to mark expired stock as non-pickable, non-accessible or delete it completely.

From a technical perspective, this means that reservations are always verified and re-distributed (if necessary) if there occurred updates on an (expected) stock. Only time-triggered changes are currently not considered when re-distributing reservations.

Over-reservations

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

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