A common problem encountered in e-commerce environments is that of item
availability and the prospect of assured delivery by a requested date.
This class of problems is commonly known as available to promise, or
ATP.
An enterprise that uses a supply chain optimization system or enterprise
resource planning (ERP) system will generally query their system to determine
whether a product can be delivered by the requested delivery date. Some
firms, particularly those with online trading relationships with several
vendors, may wish to determine product availability before committing to order
the products.
An ATP capability means effectively accessing a firm's ERP or supply
chain optimization system. In the following example, the Server Access
APIs are utilized to perform the following tasks:
- Data conversion - Convert an incoming quote object from its
HTML format to an IBM WebSphere business object.
- Collaboration execution - Trigger a collaboration that
retrieves the ATP data for each item encountered in the incoming quote
object.
- Results retrieval - Return results as an HTML table.
Figure 9 depicts a single available to promise collaboration.
Figure 9. An available-to-promise e-commerce scenario

- The browser client sends an HTML form that contains the data corresponding
to an IncomingQuote object. The IncomingQuote object is HTML formatted
data supplied by a third-party application.
- The servlet (see example code below) uses the Server Access APIs to
convert the HTML to a generic SalesQuote object and then send it to the
collaboration.
- The ATP Access Collaboration then retrieves the available-to-promise date
from the SAP connector.
- The collaboration returns this information to the servlet.
- The servlet constructs an HTML table containing an ATP date for each
requested item and displays this table on the client browser.
