Mastering sales order priorities in Katana ensures that your inventory and production align seamlessly with your sales strategy, whether you're working on a Make-to-Stock or Make-to-Order basis.
This guide explains how to adjust order priorities directly in the Sell screen, impacting product availability and manufacturing scheduling, thereby enhancing operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Changing order priorities
You can drag and drop sales orders (SOs) in the Sell screen to quickly change their priority.
The priority of an SO has different effects in Katana depending on whether you are applying a Make-to-Stock (MTS) or Make-to-Order (MTO) approach.
Read more about Make-to-Stock vs Make-to-Order manufacturing orders.
The importance of priority in sales orders
In Make-to-Stock, Sales items availability affects sales orders
Higher priority SOs reserve products in your inventory before those with a lower priority. This only applies to SOs that aren't connected to an MTO manufacturing order (MO).
Examples:
You create 3 SOs, each requiring 3 pcs of the same product. From the Production column, you DON'T select + Make → + Make to order for any of these SOs.
From the Inventory tab in the Stock screen, the product shows 4 pcs within In stock and 3 pcs under Expected. Also, the Committed column shows 9 pcs, which are related to the 3 created SOs.
The SO with the highest rank will show Sales items availability as In stock since the quantity (4 pcs) is larger than the SO's requirement (3 pcs).
The SO below this one shows Sales items availability as Expected despite the In stock quantity being 4 pcs. This is because the SO above already reserved 3 out of the 4 pcs and there is not enough left for the next SO. However, 3 pcs have already been ordered from manufacturing and are expected in the future.
The SO with the lowest priority of the 3 shows Not available under Sales items availability although In stock quantity is 4 pcs and Expected is 3 pcs. The other two sales orders with higher priority have already reserved 6 out of 7 pcs and there isn't enough left for this SO. In this case, you should create a manufacturing order for this product.
Note: If you change the priority of these sales orders, the Sales items availability status also changes.
Enable priority management using the Make-to-Order approach
From the Sell screen, if you click on + Make → Make to order under the Production column, an MO for all products required by the SO will be created. This MO will be directly linked to the applicable SO.
The priority of an MO in the Make screen should match with the priority of the linked SO in the Sell screen. The relative position of a MO linked to a SO will change according to the SO priority and vice versa.
Note: The priority of Make-to-Stock manufacturing orders in the Schedule tab will not be affected by re-prioritizing Make-to-Order Manufacturing orders.
How priorities affect Ingredients availability statuses
Materials are committed to orders based on their priority. Ingredients availability takes into account the ingredient requirements (i.e. materials and subassemblies) of both manufacturing and sales orders.
If you change the priority of an SO, the Ingredient availability for orders is recalculated based on the updated priority.
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