Reserved Locations

Enter Yes in Reserved Locations to display the second frame of Location Maintenance where you assign reserved locations to specified customers. Reserved locations let you dedicate inventory to a specific customer or customers to ensure an adequate supply for sales orders.

Note: Use Reserved Location Maintenance (2.1.9.1) to make adjustments to the reserved location data set up in Location Maintenance. See here.

Enter a customer address and indicate whether this location is the customer’s primary location; also specify whether detail allocations should normally be created. The primary location always defaults on new sales quotes and orders. Each customer can have only one primary location at a site, but you do not need to designate any reserved location as primary.

When you create a sales order for a customer with a reserved location, the reserved location defaults during line-item entry. For other customers, the system automatically blocks sales order line-item entry or shipment from a reserved location.

Note: When doing general allocations in Sales Order Maintenance, the system does not update location detail records for locations with inventory status codes that have Available set to No—the recommended setting for reserved locations. In these cases, entering subsequent sales orders for the same item in non-reserved locations may display an incorrect quantity available to allocate at the bottom of the line-item frame. Set Detail Allocate to Yes in Location Maintenance to avoid this situation.

Important: The system does not prevent you from reserving the same site and location for multiple customers. You must ensure that only appropriate customers are assigned to reserved locations. Use Reserved Location Browse (2.1.9.2) and Report (2.1.9.3) to monitor customer associations with reserved locations.

The management of inventory in a reserved location depends on assigning an appropriate inventory status code to the location.

Important: Since all inventory detail records in the location must have the correct status code, you should create new locations for the reserved inventory.

Set up the status code in Inventory Status Code Maintenance (1.1.1) before assigning it to the new location in Location Maintenance:

• Set Available to Allocate to No. This prohibits allocating inventory from reserved inventory to undesignated customers. This setting does not affect customers who have been assigned a reserved location.

• Set Nettable to No. This excludes reserved inventory from Materials Requirement Planning (MRP) functions. Otherwise, the system counts reserved inventory in its planning functions, and inventory shortages for other customers may occur.

• Set Overissue to Yes or No, depending on your inventory management policy on issuing inventory from a location that has a zero or negative inventory balance.

• Set up restricted transactions for all non-sales order transactions. This prohibits non-sales order transactions for reserved locations inventory. For example, apply restrictions to work order component issue, DRP shipments, RMA shipments, issue and receipt transactions, and others that may allow other order functions to access reserved-location inventory.

When an item is entered on a sales order, the default location is normally the one associated with the item in Item Master Maintenance. When reserved locations exist for the order customer, a new method is used to determine the default location.

The system checks for reserved location records for the ship-to customer address, then the sold-to address, and finally the bill-to address. If a record is found with Primary set to Yes, this location is used as the default. If reserved locations are defined for one of the order address records but none are designated as primary, the first reserved location found alphabetically within the site is used as the default.