Other facilities provided by the Outstanding Orders management program include:

• Intervene in the automatic release of outstanding orders for any title with insufficient stock, to fully supply selected backorders or forward orders.
• Manual and automatic title substitution.
• Changes can be cancelled prior to the update taking effect.
• Quantities may be reduced and customer delivery addresses altered.
• When an outstanding order is released the system checks definitions on Control Files for the retrieval of:
  1. Price and Discount
     • Always recalculate to obtain the current price/discount.
     • Recalculate only if the price/discount have not been overridden at order entry.
     • Compare the price/discount on the outstanding order with the price file/the discount file and always take the lower price/lower discount.
     • Compare the price/discount on the outstanding order with the price file/the discount file and always take the higher discount.
     • Leave price/discount as per outstanding order.
     • Retrieve the price/discount from the customer master file.
  2. Sales rep
     • Sales rep as per outstanding order
     • Retrieve the sales rep from the sales rep definition masterfile
     • Retrieve the sales rep from the customer masterfile
  3. Carrier
     • Carrier code as per outstanding order
     • Retrieve the carrier code from the customer masterfile.
  4. Payment terms
     • Recalculate only if the payment terms have not been overridden at order entry.
     • Retrieve Payment Terms from Customer Masterfile.

These instructions are defined for each different type of outstanding order and determine whether the above mentioned codes are to be overridden at release and if so with what.

• Backordered titles are automatically merged with recently placed orders, with customer agreement.
• Amendments to the Backorder file take effect immediately thus eliminating the need to execute any edit runs.
• A record of all changes to the file is automatically produced by the system in the form of a maintenance list.
• If an outstanding order is created from a cash sale, and payment has been made by credit card, the credit card information is transferred to that order and is maintainable. A report is available which lists any outstanding orders, paid by credit card that have passed a given expiry date. The cut-off date of these orders should be the same as the credit card expiry date so that expired orders are not supplied as they cannot be released into the system.

A group “reservation” account is used for group reservations.  TMSDS/OS-RSVG1 and TMSDS/OS-RSVG2 link the reservation account to the stores for the purposes of linking the store orders to the reservation order and decrement the group reservation automatically.

Inter-Warehouse transfers show as outstanding orders in outstanding orders inquiries to highlight the fact that there has only been one side of the transaction, i.e. the Transfer Out of the warehouse, but there is no Transfer In to the designated warehouse, thus leaving a quantity in-transit on the system.

The stock needs to be receipted into the nominated warehouse for the transaction process to complete and this will cause the product to drop off the Outstanding Orders inquiries.

If the transfer out has gone into backorder and the transaction is at status ‘I’ or ‘C’ then the order can still be maintained, this is determined by TMSDS/OS-CTL.

Backorder line splits

The Backorder line splitting occurs in either status ‘E’ or ‘K’, depending on the setting in TMSDS/B/O-SPLS.  If Backorder lines need to be split early, it will split the order by physical warehouses and carry out warehouse diversion before splitting Backorder lines.

Orders can be split for certain title class/warehouse depending on the setting in TMSDS/ORDD3-R1 and TMSDS/ORDD3-R2. A date/time stamp is written for the original order if a backorder line split takes place.

Status E orders are split off if immediate pick is flagged as No.  This means unsupplied lines are split off to backorder or lost prior to orders reaching pending or status K.

Backorder line splitting does not happen for stock status/customer backorder acceptance to backorder if it originated from a backorder (TORG=B). If a mixture is set to be split, then all components for the mixture are to be split as well.

When an order is split for backorder lines, it will not update status to ‘A’ so that the order can go through all order processing (including pending check and picking merge) and lets Picking Slip Merge to change the status to A and to generate backorders etc.

Release outstanding orders

The routine to release outstanding orders is as follows:

• Outstanding orders are selected for release, or maintenance/release.
• Various options are available within this module to provide for both manual and automatic selection.
• An insufficient stock report is generated either automatically or manually, which shows those titles with insufficient stock levels to fill all of their outstanding orders. This report can then be used to redistribute the available stock over the orders, if so required.
• A substitution function allows for the substitution of an outstanding title on all the customer orders that have that title, with another title. For example and old edition is replaced with new edition, in one transaction.
• The affected orders are retrieved and have the outstanding title replaced with the new title, with customer agreement. These orders can then be reviewed and selected for release when sufficient stock becomes available.
• If any doubt exists about the correctness of the orders marked for release, the Reset option is selected. This may relate to one or all warehouses.
• The O/S Order – Release/Update menu option releases the selected outstanding orders into the system for processing. Release is by order type and, if so required, for a specific warehouse only, to allow for greater control for invoice generation/print and for the scheduling of picking and dispatch in the warehouse.  The order entries are validated, stock levels and warehouse allocations are updated and a credit check is performed against the customer’s outstanding balance.
• The invoice print is then generated using a printing facility in the Inventory Management module.
• Outstanding orders are purged based on their cut-off dates, plus their retention period (which is defined on the relevant system Control File).
• An Outstanding Orders Reporting function is available which details outstanding and lost orders.

Release back orders

Backorder release can be done by physical warehouse, logical warehouse or group code options. It will enable the release of orders into one process number from multiple logical warehouses tied to one group code.