Customer Service Areas (CSA) 

Use

You can define Customer Service Areas (CSA) to uniquely identify a set of allocation groups (a set of orders grouped together based on your own criteria). The CSA environment allows multiple users (in multiple locations) to own and manage the stock allocated to their sales orders, thus reducing or minimizing stock contention.

The CSA belongs to a Customer Service Representative (CSR), who is the only person authorized and responsible for updating the orders and their allocation statuses in the ARun Optimizer. In addition, you can make Customizing settings so that when a CSR deallocates stock for orders within the CSA, the freed stock remains reserved for that CSR or the CSR's substitute (who inherits the authorizations of the CSR). This is referred to as CSR stock and is available to the CSR for subsequent allocations.

With the proper authorization, it is possible to transfer CSR stock to unrestricted stock or to another CSR.

Prerequisites

You create CSAs via Customizing (AFS Allocation Run  ® ARun Optimizer  ® Customer Service Areas).

Integration

You can permanently group specific schedule lines together during order creation, based on predefined criteria of your choosing. These permanent groups are called allocation groups. This feature is in addition to the temporary grouping function, where the groups are created dynamically during the Allocation Run.

You can assign multiple allocation groups to a Customer Service Area (CSA), but an allocation group can only be assigned to one CSA. Thus, there is an n:1 relationship between allocation groups and CSAs.

In the ARun Optimizer, CSRs are able to automatically retrieve orders for their assigned allocation groups so that the CSR owns both the orders and the stock allocated to those orders. A CSR can work with his own stock and a user cannot use stock that belongs to some other CSR.