The inventory availability safety factor defines a fixed quantity or percentage that is excluded from inventory availability for various purposes. Application of the inventory availability safety factor is controlled at the scheduling rule, supply type, and node type.
When dealing with store availability in a scenario where availability is shared between online consumers and in-store customers, the actual availability of a product at any given time may not be accurate, due to misplaced items, items in shopping carts, or items on reserve. This may lead to over-promising to online consumers.
Using the inventory availability safety factor, stores can define the quantity or percentage of inventory, by item or inventory supply type, to be excluded from the inventory availability that is visible to online consumers.
Future inventory is supply that is expected to arrive at a supplier, but is not yet on hand. Future inventory that is generated by a purchase order can be used by an enterprise to promise against new and existing orders. However, in some cases, not all future inventory can be considered to be completely reliable. For example, if an enterprise has just placed a purchase order to one of its suppliers, it's possible that the order may become backordered. Therefore, the enterprise may only want to consider 40% of the future supply created by the purchase order for order promising. If the supply has been shipped and is in transit, the enterprise can be more confident that the supply is received in a timely manner. Therefore, the enterprise can safely promise up to 95% of the in transit supply.
Sterling Selling and Fulfillment Foundation provides for this flexibility. Each enterprise can define the percentage of each supply type that can be used to promise demand.
The unplanned inventory is the inventory that is assumed to be available based on the lead time of an item. For example, if there is an order inquiry for 10 quantities of item1 with the lead time of 10 days, and there are only 7 quantities of item1 in onhand inventory. When unplanned inventory is considered, the order can be scheduled against the following inventory:
Onhand Inventory = Available on current date for 7 quantities
Unplanned Inventory = Available on current date + 10 days (lead time) for 3 quantities