Cancellation and Season Release 

Use

Customers may include a cancel date in their orders, beyond which date they will no longer accept shipments. This information is stored in the Cancel Date field within the sales orders. You can configure the ARun Optimizer to prevent the automatic release of an order if the estimated shipping date would occur after the cancel date.

Assume you have received Order 123 from one of your customers.

·         Wednesday: You execute an allocation run. Order 123 is fully allocated and ready for shipment. However, you do not create deliveries immediately. Instead, shipments are held up.

·         Friday: This is the cancel date in Order 123.

·         Monday: You create deliveries for Wednesday’s allocated stock. Order 123 is included, even though it has passed the cancel date.

You want to make sure the system detects this situation and either cancels the order automatically or warns the customer service representative to take action

The same is true for out-of-season goods. The system can check to make sure that materials are not shipped beyond their valid season dates. It can also check the confirmed shipping date for the sales order item.

Prerequisites

In Customizing for the ARun Optimizer, you can configure the system to carry out checks for cancel dates, season-end dates, and confirmed dates. These checks will be performed for all schedule lines when you enter an allocation group. If a schedule line fails a check, the system stores a message and displays an icon each list level. This lets the customer service representatives see that at least one schedule line on the current level failed a check.

The Customizing path is AFS Allocation Run ® ARun Optimizer ® ARun Optimizer Control ® Configure ARun Optimizer Type. Here you can assign an allocation rule to the ARun Optimizer type. If you have maintained the aforementioned checks in the allocation rule, the system will perform these checks in the ARun Optimizer.

For each of the data settings, you can specify:

• The number of days away from the delivery date that ARun should perform the date checks. For example, if this field contains 5 and you execute an ARun today, ARun flags all schedule lines that have cancel dates and where today’s date is within this horizon (that is, there are 5 or fewer days between today and the cancel date). If you leave this field blank, the ARun only checks to see whether the cancel date matches the current date.
• Whether or not schedule lines that fail the date check should be automatically excluded from allocation. If you flag failed schedule lines to be excluded, the release check does not consider the corresponding allocated quantities in calculating fulfillment. In addition, the result of a release check does not impact the excluded assignments. For example: if the release check succeeds, only the included assignments are released; the excluded ones keep their previous MRP status.
• The type of message the system should display (red or yellow traffic light) if a schedule line fails the check. If you leave this field blank, the check is turned off.