The scenario

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 Interface APIs are utilized to perform the following tasks:

Figure 8 depicts a single available to promise collaboration.

Figure 8. An available-to-promise e-commerce scenario

  1. 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.
  2. The servlet (see example code below) uses the Server Access Interface APIs to convert the HTML to a generic SalesQuote object and then send it to the collaboration.
  3. The ATP Access Collaboration then retrieves the available-to-promise date from the SAP connector.
  4. The collaboration returns this information to the servlet.
  5. The servlet constructs an HTML table containing an ATP date for each requested item and displays this table on the client browser.

Copyright IBM Corp. 2004, 2005