Supply Allocation Cutover Process
Your organization has recently decided to turn on NetSuite’s supply allocation module, and you’re wondering what the cutover process looks like. In summary, this module will allow you to allocate existing on hand inventory and incoming supply from Purchase Orders and Inbound Shipments to demand on Sales Orders and Transfer Orders. It’s important to think ahead when implementing this module and ensuring you have access to the data needed to make it useful.
I recently helped a large distributor implement the feature, and here’s the steps we followed:
First, identify the subject matter experts or process owners that own this process. They’ll need to be involved every step of the way.
Have them identify the Order Allocation Strategies that should be used. At the simplest level, these can be time fenced so as to allocate items to an order within a certain number of days. The most common tends to be 30, 60, 90. Higher priority customers should be assigned a supply allocation with more days, as this will allocate on hand inventory and incoming supply with more lead time. Order Allocation Strategies look like this:
A 30-days Allocation Strategy
3. Ensure the process owners can provide the following pieces of data. The more data, and the more accurate it is, the better Supply Allocation can operate.
Expected Receipt Date per item, per PO
Assignment of supply allocation strategies per customer, ideally in excel format. The customer record holds a field called “Default Allocation Strategy” that we will be updating via CSV import.
Sales channel values, if using. You can think of these as the different channels within the business where you may want to allocate products in a different manner. For example, you want to reserve inventory for eCom orders to ensure that your wholesale orders don’t take up all of your inventory. Creating sales channels and order reservations will help you do this.
Keep in mind there is no sales channel field on the customer record. It may make sense to create a custom field on the customer record to store whether a customer is a wholesale/retail customer.
A list of Order Reservations, if using. These are used in combination with sales channels to reserve, or hold, inventory. These records are created on a per item, per sales channel basis. Order Reservations look like this. Keep in mind these can be imported via the CSV Import Tool.
Building Order Reservations through the User Interface
4. Once all these pieces of data are available, there are multiple steps to take to import and update existing transactions. The following steps will update existing lines on Purchase Orders and Sales Orders transactions. As such, caution and care is recommended when taking on these steps. Racette Consulting recommends the oversight of this CSV process by a qualified consultant.
First, update lines on Purchase Orders with provided Expected Receipt Dates. The Supply Allocation module intends to allocate incoming supply based on the earliest available receipt date for an item.
For this first step, I used a double-nested MATCH INDEX formula in Excel, to match on both PO# and Item to retrieve the proper Line ID on the Purchase Order. I created a saved search to extract the Line ID.
Next, update lines on Sales Orders with the assigned Supply Allocation. Build a saved search to expose all sales order lines where the customer’s assigned Default Allocation Strategy is not blank. Expose the Default Allocation Strategy field, and extract to Excel. Always expose the Transaction’s internal ID and item Line IDs. Then take the value from the Customer’s assigned Default Allocation Strategy and update the line’s Allocation Strategy.
Your saved search should look like this:
Sales Order Saved Search to Expose the Customer’s default Allocation Strategy
When turning on the module, you should see that NetSuite will push down the date value in the Ship Date field at the header of the Sales Order down to the lines in the Supply Required by Date field. Confirm this on a few sales orders.
I have all of the saved searches above already built out. Do not hesitate to reach out to me if you need support.
Review a few sales orders and confirm that the items are being allocated properly. Ensure that users are assigning expected receipt dates on POs. Data quality is very important for this module to operate efficiently!