A key account calls on Tuesday and asks for 400 units by next Wednesday. Sales wants to say yes before the call ends. The plant wants a day to look. Both are reasonable, and the gap between them causes a large share of broken delivery promises.

A yes given on the phone without checks often lands on the planner’s desk as a problem. Three questions, answered in order, turn that call into a commitment the plant can keep.

Check One: Is the Stock Actually Free?

Finished goods on the shelf are rarely all available. Some units are already reserved for open orders with earlier dates. Available to promise answers the real question by period. It takes stock on hand, adds scheduled receipts and subtracts quantities already committed to customers. The period matters as much as the total. Units free today can still be claimed by an order due next Monday, so the calculation should run day by day up to the requested ship date.

Work through an illustrative case. The warehouse shows 260 units of the item. Open orders due this week have claimed 110 of them, which leaves 150 free. The customer wants 400, so 250 must come from production. Using available to promise for urgent orders in this way stops sales from promising stock that another customer already owns.

Check Two: Can Materials and the Bottleneck Cover the Gap?

Producing 250 extra units needs two things on time. The first is material. Say each unit uses one machined casting. Stores hold 300 castings, with 120 reserved for other work orders, so 180 are free. Seventy are short. A confirmed supplier delivery of 500 castings arrives on Friday, which covers the gap if the production slot falls after Friday.

The second is capacity on the constraint resource.

Assume the bottleneck is a heat-treatment furnace that processes 25 units an hour. The extra 250 units need ten furnace hours before the ship date. The current schedule leaves seven free hours in that window. Three hours are missing. Checking every machine on the routing would waste time here, since only the furnace limits output this week. This is the point of constraint-based supply planning, which plans against the real capacity of the constraint resources and treats the other machines as able to keep up.

Check Three: Who Pays for the Yes?

Finding three furnace hours means moving something else. Before anyone agrees, the planner should see exactly which orders shift and by how much.

Suppose two candidate orders could give up their furnace slots. Order A belongs to a distributor, is due in nine days and has four hours booked. Moving it by two days still meets its date. Order B is due in four days for another key account and cannot slip without a call to that customer. The choice is obvious once it is laid out, and it takes minutes on a planning screen that shows the knock-on effect of a resequence before anything is changed. Without that view, teams tend to expedite blindly and discover the casualty a week later.

Freight and changeovers belong in this check too. An urgent order that forces an extra furnace changeover may cost two hours of output on top of its own run time. A partial shipment is another option, with 150 units leaving this week and the remaining 250 the following Monday.

What Should Sales Hear Back?

Give sales a dated answer with conditions attached. For example, 150 units ship Thursday and 250 ship Wednesday, provided the casting delivery lands Friday and Order A moves two days. That answer takes perhaps an hour to produce when the data is current. A conditional date also lets the customer decide. Some buyers take the split happily, because half the order often covers their immediate need.

How Can Teams Make This Routine?

Write the three checks into the order acceptance process and agree who signs off each one. Planners own the material and capacity answers. Sales leadership owns the decision to delay another customer. A one-page form with three signed boxes is enough for many plants.

Measure it as well. Track how many urgent orders were accepted each month, how many shipped on the promised date and which existing orders slipped to make room. Available to promise for urgent orders works only when the material view and the capacity view agree. Constraint-based supply planning keeps the capacity side accurate, so the yes given on Tuesday still holds the following Wednesday.

For a closer look at dated order promises, book a short demo with the Oritiq team.