Enhance Order Promise with Material Constraints and Finite Capacity

In global supply chain environment, companies need advanced available-to-promise (ATP) system to efficiently allocate resources to promise customer orders. Both material and capacity constraints should be considered to provide more accurate and reliable order commitments. This study proposes an ATP system considering critical material constraints and finite capacity to enhance order promise. A customer may approve of substituting the original configuration for another compatible one because of material storage or avoiding denial of its order. Moreover, to protect the material vendors that are conglomerate of some customers, customers may allocate their preferential materials and designate the priority of their preferential material vendors. Thus, considered material constraints are material availability, customer preferences, substitutive materials and material compatibility and these material and capacity constraints will be modeled by integer programming. Then, sales can allocate the accumulated finish goods volumes to fulfill customer orders. The objective of this ATP system is to efficiently allocate available material and capacity to facilitate companies more profitable and to improve customer service with more reliable order promising.