Available-To-Promise (ATP)

CIOP is an end-to-end supply chain certification program that focuses on practical aspects in addition to the theoretical concepts. For example, a typical supply chain certification may teach what is cycle counting and how to do the ABC classification. CIOP starts with these fundamental concepts and goes on to teach the participants to develop the cycle counting policy of an organisation, 10+ criteria used in ABC classification, multi-criteria ABC classification and cycle counting best practices to increase the efficiency and effectiveness. In case of CIOP, you learn the concepts and will be ready to implement in your day-to-day job in supply chain. The pedagogy is structured such a way that all the concepts are explained with industry examples, which makes CIOP as the preferred training and certification program for supply chain within the industry.

As a logistics manager I'm often asked what I would recommend for my company in terms of tools to improve their available to promise ratio. The answer is simple, purchase a good logistics software. There are many to 

choose from and many of them have been developed by experts in the field. These programs integrate with your current supply chain management applications to help you better understand your warehousing needs. Once you understand why it's important to have your warehouse in good operating order, you can then take steps to ensure this is the case.

For example if you know that your company buys a ton of inventory per month and that most of this inventory is located in just a few select locations across the country you might want to consider using a logistical data integration (LDI) program to monitor the location of all of this inventory. You can use the location data to identify areas of shipping constraint and storage space. In addition to helping you locate the locations of potential problem you can also suggest ways you can improve the flow of traffic to these locations. This may mean rerouting some shipments or utilizing supervisory staff to physically monitor the shipping process more carefully. In addition, if you find that the distance between shipping points is actually increasing the amount of time it takes to fulfill an order this can be a sign that something more substantial is wrong.

Another tool that is available to any warehouse manager is an online system that can identify and monitor all of the physical inbound inventory that they have. This capability can allow a manager to respond quickly to changes in their available space as well as in the type of products that are on hand. If there is a change in address, a warehouse might only be aware of it once they have entered the system and are able to access it. With access to real time reports such as availability and shipment status any manager can quickly and easily see if there are issues brewing.

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