A one-day confirmation gap and an order that never reaches the due list
On Monday at 08:00 a customer orders 300 EA of material 4711 with a requested delivery date of Thursday. Plant 1010 shows 400 EA in unrestricted stock and a further 150 EA in quality inspection. The order is created in the standard order type and confirmed for Friday. A second order from the same customer, 100 EA of the same material, created the same morning, does not appear in the delivery due list at all, although it too is confirmed. Shipping point determination for plant 1010 resolves to shipping point 1010; the route has a transit time of two days; picking and packing take one working day and loading one working day. Goods issue is posted the day after picking. The order desk insists that with 400 EA on hand the order must confirm for Thursday.
1. Reconstruct the backward scheduling for this order and show where the day is lost.
Read the worked answer
Work backwards from the requested delivery date and compare each step with the order's schedule lines:
- Requested delivery date: Thursday.
- Minus transit time (2 working days) → delivery and goods issue date Tuesday.
- Minus pick/pack (1 working day) → loading date Monday.
- Minus loading time (1 working day) → material availability date the preceding Friday.
If the order still confirms Friday, the constraint is not stock: 400 EA covers 300 EA. Look, in this order, at:
- Working days and calendars. Transit and lead times are calculated in working days using the factory calendar of the route or the ship-to country. A public holiday between Monday and Thursday moves the confirmation silently.
- The ATP result in the order, not the stock figure: read the availability date and the confirmed quantity on the schedule line. The 150 EA in quality inspection are not available; if they were being consumed, that is a second, independent defect.
- Rounding profile or the proposed delivery date in the order type, either of which can shift the result to the next working day.
Only if all three are clean is the master data (transit time, pick/pack time) wrong - and then it is a data problem, not an ATP problem.
2. The second order is missing from the delivery due list. Give your checks in order of least effort and say what each rules out.
Read the worked answer
Cheapest first, because most due-list misses are selection or blocking issues rather than ATP.
- Selection horizon. The due list is selected by delivery date range. A Friday confirmation excluded from a Monday-to-Thursday selection simply does not appear. One look at the selection screen resolves it and rules out everything downstream.
- Header and item delivery blocks, plus the overall processing status. A block removes the item without a message during selection. A credit block shows separately as a credit status and is a different fix.
- Shipping point determination. Without a shipping point, no delivery can be created. Check plant-to-shipping-point determination and the unloading point.
- Item category or schedule line category relevance for delivery, common when items are copied from a quotation with a custom item category.
- The schedule line's confirmed date and quantity. A confirmed quantity of zero with a future availability date means the item is simply not due yet.
Report which one it was: 1 and 5 are user education, 2 is process, 3 and 4 are customizing.
3. The customer insists on Thursday. What levers do you have, and which would you refuse to pull?
Read the worked answer
Legitimate levers
- Split the delivery: ship what is confirmed today and the balance later, if the customer accepts two deliveries. Here all 300 EA are in unrestricted stock, so this buys nothing - but it is the first lever whenever availability, not lead time, is the constraint.
- Use express forwarding if the route's transit time can genuinely be beaten. That is a commercial decision with a freight cost, not a customizing change. Overwriting the transit time in the route master to 'make the date' corrupts every future order on that route.
- Correct master data that the warehouse confirms is wrong (pick/pack, loading time).
What to refuse
- Releasing the 150 EA from quality inspection to free stock without a quality decision.
- Manually overwriting the confirmation date in the order. The plant will not deliver on a date that ATP never produced.
What to say: explain the Friday confirmation using the schedule line detail, so the customer conversation is about the real constraint - a calendar day or a lead time - rather than about stock.