In situations where insufficient stock prevents the complete filling of an order, the system keeps track of the order shortage quantities, item by item. To help you to fill the back orders with a minimum of inventory movements, you can use shortage clearance algorithms. When you link these algorithms to inventory receipt transactions, the system automatically checks to see if the received stock can be used to fill back orders. The inventory is moved from receipt to dispatch, being stored in between. This type of movement is also known as cross-docking.

By linking the appropriate internal routings to the transaction types, you can route the relevant stock directly from the receipt dock to the shipping dock, thus removing the need for additional put-away and picking activities. The remaining received stock that is not required for shortage clearance is put away using the normal routines.

A repick is new, typically shortened picking that staff perform when inventory is missing and they want to fulfill the order quantity by picking the item in another location. When staff repick for cross-docking, the system looks for any open pre-shipper and adds lines to it. This only works if the pre-shipper was not converted to a shipper; if converted, the system adds the lines on a new pre-shipper.

You create a shortage transaction type using Transaction Type Maintenance (4.7.1). You link the transaction in Internal Routing Assignment (4.2.9). Set the Clear Shortages field to Yes in Internal Routing Assignment. Then, you assign the shortage clearance algorithms to the appropriate transaction types using Algorithm Assignment Maintenance (4.6.9).

See Algorithms.

You can specify cross-docking details for the shortage clearance using the following four shortage fields defined for distribution order (SHRT-DO), sales order (SHRT-SO), and work order (SHRT-WO) transactions in Transaction Type Maintenance: