Manufacturing · availability and delivery promise (ATP)
Availability answers the question every industrial customer asks: when can you deliver? The CRM mirrors the stock from your ERP or WMS by product, plant, lot and serial, and calculates the available quantity and the ATP (how much you can actually promise, counting replenishment on the way), classifying each line as available, low, backorder or stockout. The CRM does not own the accounting stock: it interprets the mirror and always shows how old it is.
Promising a delivery by looking at gross stock is like looking at your bank balance and ignoring the checks you have written. In industry, a good part of what is in the warehouse already has an owner: it is reserved for a work order, committed to another order, or still on its way from the supplier. ATP, short for available to promise, is what genuinely remains for you to promise to this customer, right now.
The arithmetic, in two lines
The CRM keeps four quantities per stock line: on hand, reserved, committed and in transit. From those:
- Available is on hand minus reserved minus committed. It can go negative, and going negative is information, not an error.
- ATP is available plus what is in transit, that is, what you can promise counting replenishment already on the way.
The status comes out of that ATP. Above the alert threshold, the line is Available. Positive but within the threshold, it is Low. Zero or negative with material in transit, it is Backorder, because delivery exists and only depends on the replenishment arriving. Zero or negative with nothing in transit, it is Stockout: no promise is possible without producing or buying.
Granularity: product, plant, lot and serial
The mirror does not keep one number per product, it keeps one line per combination of product, plant, lot and serial number. That matters in sectors with traceability: having ten pieces in total does not help if the customer requires a specific lot, or if the pieces are at the wrong plant in the wrong country. When you ask for a product total, the CRM adds the lines and returns the summed available quantity, the summed ATP and the resulting status, while the line by line reading stays available to whoever has to decide where to pull from.
How old is that number
Every availability line carries two pieces of information systems usually lack: the date and time that balance refers to, and which source system reported it. Alongside them, the CRM calculates the age of the data in hours. An ATP of 40 units captured two hours ago is one thing; the same number captured nine days ago is another. The CRM always returns both together, so nobody promises against an old snapshot without knowing it is old.
Refreshing and alerts
Refreshing the mirror is idempotent: sending the same balance again for the same combination of product, plant, lot and serial rewrites the line instead of duplicating it, so a load repeated by mistake inflates nothing. Each submission can also carry the estimated lead time and the confirmed lead time, which is the difference between what the factory usually takes and what it has committed to in this case.
On top of that mirror, the CRM builds the alert list: every line in your catalog with zero or negative ATP, split between backorder and stockout. It is the work queue for whoever runs supply, and it is the right place to look before a campaign or a trade show, not after.
Prerequisites and limits
- The Manufacturing vertical has to be turned on in Settings → Verticals.
- Refreshing the mirror requires write permission; querying availability only requires read access to the vertical.
- Availability does not have a tab of its own on the Manufacturing screen today: it is fed by the integration with your ERP or WMS and consumed along the quote and order cycle.
- With no mirrored line at all, a product's ATP is zero and its status is stockout. That is absence of information, not absence of stock: mirror first, conclude later.
- Lead time is not calculated by the CRM. It is reported by the source and only stored and displayed.