How to anticipate the potential missings of orders?

How to anticipate stock shortages? How to anticipate orders over several days?

In date-to-date model (the customer can choose the rental start and end dates), it is possible to have missing items in orders because:

• the customer books in advance on the basis of a quantity in stock at a T time
• the stock of parts in good condition may have changed between the time of the rental reservation and the order shipping date.

For example: if a product A has only 2 unique copies available for rental and a customer books these 2 copies for next month, and unfortunately, another customer has damaged one of the 2 copies he rented a few days after the first customer's order, then we will have a missing copy.

Being able to identify the missing copies will allow you to anticipate the problem and find solutions upfront: for example, check with the customer whether it would be possible to exchange a missing product from his order with another equivalent product, or quickly restock with the missing product etc.

Detail: the forecast requirement does not take into account products that must return from current rentals and that contain the same product as the one that appears to be missing. In the example above, if at the time of placing the order, a product A was already rented by a customer, and it was due to return in 3 days, the calculation does not take into account the fact that this product could be used in place of the damaged product. We prefer to anticipate and bring the stock back to its initial state by putting a forecast requirement.

In practice

Go to the “Outwards” module then to the “forecast requirement” section.

This section allows you to have a view of all articles that will be sent over the next 5 days (filter applied by default) and therefore to anticipate needs. If the "Warning" sign appears on a line, it means that there is a potential missing article, in connection with a registered order.

It is then necessary to check the real stock, the refit stock and if the products in repair will be repaired before the order.

If the item is actually unavailable, contact your after-sales service so that they can notify the end customer.

Special case of second-hand: when an item is ordered, it changes to "reserved" status before the order is prepared. The "In stock" column of the forecast requirement contains products actually in stock and also products reserved for orders, so as not to have an alert for a second-hand order whose product is well reserved.