Availability

Availability is the quantity of an item that a business can commit to delivering to customers on a specific date based on current on-hand and future supply levels. It represents the amount of inventory that has not already been allocated to existing orders or reservations and has not been kept aside (locked) for any reason.

Availability helps in managing customer expectations and ensuring that the items can be delivered in a timely manner. Availability is impacted by current inventory levels, future supply, lead time, existing orders and reservations, safety stock, and availability rules.

Availability also helps avoid overpromising and underdelivering, which can lead to customer dissatisfaction and lost sales.

Bulk Availability

Bulk Availability is a feature in OneTruth that enables enterprises to fetch the availability numbers for multiple items across multiple nodes. These numbers are often accompanied by other impacting factors, such as safety stock value, information about the quantity of inventory that has been locked, or whether any item in the system is part of the infinite inventory.

Availability Calculation

Availability is calculated every time there is a change in the demand or supply of an item. For instance, Availability is calculated during inventory lock, which is temporarily blocking the availability of an item due to different business reasons. Availability is also calculated during a change in safety stock configuration, to check if the current demand can be fulfilled and if new demands can be accepted. Furthermore, availability can be calculated at the fulfillment type and node type levels. The calculation at the node type level is configurable and may be enabled or disabled by a tenant according to their business needs.

Availability can be calculated as:

Available to Promise (ATP) = Total Supply of an Item - Total Demand for an Item - Total Safety Stock of the Item (if safety stock is configured)

OneTruth considers two types of Availability:

• Node Level Availability

• Network Level Availability

Node Level Availability

Node Level Availability refers to the availability of each item at each node within an enterprise’s network. Whenever an item arrives at a node, the enterprise checks for its on-hand availability. For example, the current supply of an item at a node is 200 units, and the current demand for that item includes 30 reserved units, 30 confirmed units, 30 scheduled units, 30 released units, and 20 shipped units.

The on-hand availability of the item will be calculated as follows:

ATP (On Hand) = (Total supply of item - reserved units - confirmed units - scheduled units - released units)

ATP (On Hand) = 200 - 30 - 30 - 30 - 30 = 80 units

A new order of 5 units of the item is added to the cart. These 5 units are added to the 30 units in the “Reserved” bucket, making the total reserved units for the item equal to 35. In this case, the new availability will be calculated as follows:

ATP = 200 - 35 - 30 - 30 - 30 = 75 units

If the demand of 5 units for the item is shipped, and all the other demand buckets remain the same, then the total supply of 200 units is reduced by 5 units to 195 units, and the final ATP is calculated as follows:

ATP = 195 - 30 - 30 - 30 - 30 = 75 units

Note: Demand in a terminal demand bucket, such as shipped, canceled, or expired, is not used for availability calculation, because this demand has either already been fulfilled or is not required any more.

Note: Demand in a terminal demand bucket, such as shipped, canceled, or expired, is not used for availability calculation, because this demand has either already been fulfilled or is not required any more.

Network Level Availability

Network Level Availability refers to the availability of each item at a network level. A network refers to a configured group of nodes. OneTruth gives enterprises the ability to configure their networks by providing details such as network ID, network description, and a set of node IDs that should fall under this network.

At the network level, the supplies and demands from individual nodes are aggregated, and the Available to Promise (ATP) is calculated based on these total values. The safety stock value taken into consideration depends on configurations set at either the fulfillment-type or node-type level. If it is configured at the fulfillment-type level, a safety stock hierarchy is applied. Conversely, if it is set at the node-type level, a network node-type safety stock or default template is used. Regardless of the configuration type, individual node-level safety stock is not aggregated.