RSMUS.comNetSuite can provide many different ways to allocate items on a sales order. One common request is to allocate items based on customer priority. Some of your customers may be more important and have a higher priority. If this is the case the more important customers may need to receive the quantity that is on hand before the lower priority customers. NetSuite can be a great tool for clients that use this method when allocating items. There are steps that need to be taken in order to properly allocate items based on order priority.
Order priority in NetSuite
The first thing that you will need to do in order to allocate items based on order priority is set the item commitment transaction order preference to Order by Order. To do this navigate to Setup > Accounting > Accounting Preferences. Under the Order Management tab > Sales Orders section, there is a drop down box for Item Commitment Transaction Ordering. Set that drop down to Order by Order Priority.
Below that is a checkbox for Perform Item Commitment After Transaction Entry. The scenario that we are focusing on is when that check box is not checked. When the checkbox is not checked, a Schedule commit orders option will appear under Transaction > Inventory/Items. In Schedule commit orders, the back-ordered items can be manually reallocated based on Order Priority set in the Sales Order.
If you keep this box checked the Sales Order will not be able to follow Order by Order Priority. The Sales order, upon saving, will commit items since item commitment is performed after transaction entry, and the sales order will disregard whatever priority is set in the next sales order.
When this checkbox is checked, as a workaround, the customer can reallocate committed quantities on the Reallocate Items Page under Transactions > Inventory > Reallocate Items.
NOTE: To learn more on this form of allocation see the Suite Answers page, Reallocating Items (ID: 28053).
Sales order priority
Next you will create sales orders in your account and set the order priority on the item level. When setting the order priority, you will want to use whole numbers. The higher the number the lower the priority. So if you set the order priority on a sales order to 20 and another sales order’s priority to 10, the order priority that is set to 10 will get allocated first. For this example I have created the sales orders below.
Orders:
- Test Order 1(SLS00000654)
- This order was created first
- Ordered Zinfandel item, qty of 40, order priority of 50 on the line item
- System committed all 35 available to this order as expected
- Test Order 2 (SLS00000655)
- This order was created second
- Ordered Zinfandel item, qty of 10, order priority of 10 on the line item
- System did not commit any of the 35 to this order, which is not expected since this has a higher priority than the first order
- Test Order 3 (SLS00000656)
- This order was created third
- Ordered Zinfandel item, qty of 22, order priority of 1 on the line item
- System did not commit any of the 22 to this order, which is not expected since this has a higher priority than the first two orders
In order to allocate these quantities correctly you need to go under Transaction > Inventory > Schedule Commit Orders > Run. Once on this page you will find the orders that you have created and set the order priority on.
Note: If you are unable to find the orders that you have created click the checkbox Reallocate Open Quantities. Checking this box will change which order items are committed for fulfillment. NetSuite examines orders for item quantities that are committed but not firmed or fulfilled. These items are eligible for reallocation to another order for fulfillment. To learn more see the suite answers page, Commit Orders (ID: 32363).
Once you find the orders that you created go ahead and check those orders and click submit. If you refresh the orders you will see that the quantity committed has changed to allocate the items that have the higher order priority.
- Test Order 3 (SLS00000656):
- This order was created third
- Ordered Zinfandel item, qty of 22, order priority of 1 on the line item
- System has now committed all 22 of this item to this order, which is expected since this has a higher priority than the other two orders.
- Test Order 2 (SLS00000655)
- This order was created second
- Ordered Zinfandel item, qty of 10, order priority of 10 on the line item
- System has now committed all 10 of this item to this order, which is expected since this has a higher priority than the first test order.
- Test Order 1(SLS00000654)
- This order was created first
- Ordered Zinfandel item, qty of 40, order priority of 50 on the line item
- System committed 3 remaining available quantity to Committed. Since this has the lowest priority it has back-ordered the remaining 37.
After you can confirm that all the items have been allocated to the correct order the process should be complete. You will see the customers with a higher priority number in the item lever should receive the quantity that is on hand first before the lower priority customers.
