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:
- 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 8 depicts a single available
to promise collaboration.
Figure 8. 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
Interface 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.
