You check the stock report and the material is there. You go back to the sales order and the confirmed quantity is zero, or the date has slipped by weeks. The customer wants an explanation.<\/p>\n
The reason is almost always the same: stock being physically present is not the same as stock being available to promise.<\/strong> SAP is not looking at what sits in the warehouse. It is looking at what is genuinely free after everything already committed has been counted.<\/p>\n Broadly, three things go wrong. SAP checks for supply in the wrong place, ignores supply that is already there, or finds it at the wrong time. In practice, that shows up as one of the following.<\/p>\n The stock is already committed.<\/strong> The available quantity may already be promised to earlier or higher-priority requirements. Nothing has been picked yet, so the warehouse still shows it \u2014 but it is spoken for.<\/p>\n The order is checking the wrong plant.<\/strong> SAP checks availability in the plant determined for that order line. It does not search your other locations on its own. Stock in Plant 2000 is invisible to a check running against Plant 1000.<\/p>\n Product allocation is capping it.<\/strong> The material is available, but your customer’s entitlement for that period is used up.<\/p>\n Scope of check is excluding it.<\/strong> If blocked stock, quality inspection stock or stock in transit are switched off in the checking rule, they will not count \u2014 even though you can see them clearly in the report. This one catches people out most often.<\/p>\n The timing does not line up.<\/strong> ATP checks quantity and date. If the customer wants stock on the 5th and it only frees up on the 20th, you get a later date or nothing at all.<\/p>\n The requirement is not being passed.<\/strong> If the requirement type is set up so the order creates no requirement, the check runs but has nothing to work with.<\/p>\n The problem<\/strong><\/p>\n The client had inventory across its supply network, yet orders were still being delayed or rejected. The issue showed up whenever demand had to be met from a specific plant or distribution location. Stock existed somewhere. It just was not available from the location the order had been assigned to.<\/p>\n Sales could see the stock. Customers were being told the order could not be confirmed. Nobody could explain the gap.<\/p>\n What was causing it<\/strong><\/p>\n SAP was only checking the plant already determined for the order line. It was not evaluating whether another location could fulfil the requirement instead.<\/p>\n The check ran against one plant, found a shortfall, and returned a poor confirmation \u2014 while stock sat unused in a nearby distribution centre that could have served the customer perfectly well.<\/p>\n So planners did the system’s job by hand: investigating alternative sources, checking stock across locations, working out whether another plant could cover the order. Every day, order by order, with results depending on who picked it up and how much time they had.<\/p>\n The gap was never visibility. The business could see its inventory. The gap was between what it could see and what the confirmation process was allowed to consider.<\/p>\n We redesigned the aATP availability and supply determination setup around how the business actually fulfils demand, rather than how the system had been configured years earlier.<\/p>\n We reviewed three things: sourcing priorities (which locations serve which customers, in what order), location dependencies (which sites can realistically substitute for each other), and confirmation requirements (what counts as an acceptable confirmation).<\/p>\n We then configured Alternative-Based Confirmation (ABC) so that when the primary plant fell short, the system evaluated permitted alternative locations in the correct business priority and confirmed from there automatically.<\/p>\n The question the system answered changed. Instead of “Is this product available in this plant?”<\/em> it could now answer the question the business actually cared about: “Where can this requirement realistically be fulfilled from?”<\/em><\/p>\n Around 45\u201350 order lines a week no longer required manual source investigation. That work came out of the planners’ day entirely.<\/p>\n Planners stopped chasing alternative sources by hand. Sales gained confidence that a confirmation date meant something. Decisions that had relied on individual experience became consistent, because the rules now lived in the system rather than in people’s heads.<\/p>\n The objective was never to create more inventory. It was to make the inventory already available across the network more usable.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" You check the stock report and the material is there. You go back to the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2006,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[295],"tags":[298],"class_list":["post-2005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-sap-tm","tag-sap-aatp"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scmchamps.com\/sap-fixes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scmchamps.com\/sap-fixes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scmchamps.com\/sap-fixes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scmchamps.com\/sap-fixes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scmchamps.com\/sap-fixes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2005"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.scmchamps.com\/sap-fixes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2007,"href":"https:\/\/www.scmchamps.com\/sap-fixes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2005\/revisions\/2007"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scmchamps.com\/sap-fixes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2006"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.scmchamps.com\/sap-fixes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scmchamps.com\/sap-fixes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.scmchamps.com\/sap-fixes\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}A real example: the stock was there, just not in the right place<\/strong><\/h2>\n
How SCM Champs solved it<\/strong><\/h2>\n
The outcome<\/strong><\/h2>\n