Alpine Spares: 120 on hand, three orders, no purchase order
Alpine Spares distributes spare parts from one warehouse. SKU VALVE-20 is bought from a single Chinese supplier with a 45-day lead time and sells for €210. On-hand stock is 120 units. Three confirmed sales orders of 50 units each are waiting; the first two are already reserved. The buyer created a reordering rule on WH/Stock with min 50, max 200, trigger Auto, two weeks ago. The product also carries the 'Replenish on Order (MTO)' route because one key customer insisted on it, and a fourth order for 100 units was confirmed under MTO. No purchase order has appeared for the reordering rule, and the third 50-unit order is now three weeks late.
1. Which quantity should the buyer be looking at, and how many units would the scheduler order if it ran now?
Read the worked answer
Not On Hand. The buyer is reading 120 and concluding 'there is stock'; the number that matters for supply is the forecasted quantity at the rule's location.
- On hand: 120
- Outgoing, non-MTO: 3 × 50 = 150
- Forecast at WH/Stock: 120 − 150 = −30
- Free to use (available to reserve right now): 0 - 120 units are reserved, the third order has nothing to reserve, which is exactly why it is late.
The scheduler orders max − forecast, not max:
200 − (−30) = 230 units
subject to the vendor's minimum order quantity and the product's purchase rounding. Note the fourth order's 100 units should not be added to this - under MTO it is covered by its own purchase order. If it were also folded into the reorder forecast you would double-order, which is the core hazard of running both routes on one product.
2. The rule is correct on paper. Give the checklist you would work through to find why no purchase order exists.
Read the worked answer
Silent replenishment failures are almost always configuration, and the scheduler reports them by logging on the orderpoint rather than by raising an error:
- Trigger. 'Auto' means the daily cron. Has the scheduler actually run? Run it manually (Inventory > Operations > Run Scheduler) and re-check - a two-week-old rule on a system where the cron is disabled looks identical to a broken rule.
- Vendor. Check the product's Purchase tab: no vendor, or a vendor line with no price/min qty, and the procurement fails. The orderpoint usually carries an error message or an activity pointing at this.
- Route. The product must have the Buy route, and the route must be reachable from the orderpoint's warehouse.
- Location. The rule must sit on WH/Stock, not on the warehouse view location - a rule on a view never replenishes.
- Numbers. min and max both zero, or max below min, produces nothing.
- Product state. A product marked 'Not purchased' (or a storable switched to consumable) never generates a PO.
Start with 1 and 2; they account for most cases.
3. Was putting the MTO route on this product a good idea, and how do you get the late order out first?
Read the worked answer
No - remove it. MTO means 'never use stock, buy one-to-one for each order'. On a product you also replenish to stock, the two mechanisms fight: MTO fragments purchasing into one PO per sales order, ignores the 120 units already on the shelf, and double-counts demand against the reordering rule. It also inherits the full 45-day supplier lead time on every order, which is the opposite of what a stocked spare part is for.
If one customer genuinely needs a made-to-order commitment, give them a separate product variant or simply a longer quotation lead time - not a route on the shared SKU.
Getting the late order out:
- Open the delivery orders and check priorities; set the late order to High.
- On the two lower-priority deliveries, use Unreserve to release the 120 units.
- Run Check Availability on the urgent delivery so it reserves the freed stock.
- Then replenish the shortfall properly: with MTO removed, the reordering rule will compute the true forecast and generate a single PO for the balance.