Available-to-promise (ATP) systems: a classification and framework for analysis

Abstract

Available-to-promise (ATP) systems deal with a number of managerial decisions related to order capture activities in a company, including order acceptance/rejection, due date setting, and resource scheduling. These different but interrelated decisions have often been studied in an isolated manner, and, to the best of our knowledge, no framework has been presented to integrate them into the broader perspective of order capture. This paper attempts to provide a general framework for ATP-related decisions. By doing so, we: (1) identify the different decision problems to be addressed; (2) present the different literature-based models supporting related decisions into a coherent framework; and (3) review the main contributions in the literature for each one of these. We first describe different approaches for order capture available in the literature, depending on two parameters related to the application context of ATP systems, namely the inclusion of explicit information about due dates in the decision model, and the level of integration among decisions. According to these parameters, up to six approaches for ATP-related decisions are identified. Secondly, we show the subsequent decision problems derived from the different approaches, and describe the main issues and key references involving each one of these decision problems. Finally, a number of conclusions and future research lines are discussed.

Keywords:

• available-to-promise
• order capture
• due date management

Acknowledgements

We wish to thank the referees for their insightful and constructive comments. This research has been partly funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation under grant DPI2007-61345.

Notes

Notes

1. Additionally, the terms ‘order promising’ and ‘order fulfilment’ are not clearly defined in the literature. For instance, while Zhao et al. (2005) state that ‘… and ATP must include both order promising and order fulfilment capabilities’ (indicating them as two separate aspects), others (e.g., Pibernik 2005) consider ‘order promising’ as a part of ‘order fulfilment', while others identify order fulfilment with order capture and order execution (Lin and Shaw 1998). Finally, for other authors, order promising encompasses due date assignment plus the periodic control of the fulfilment of the so-promised due dates (Grant et al. 2002).

2. Note that, even when due dates are provided, different due dates could be established after order scheduling. However, here we regard this result as an output of order scheduling decisions and do not include it as due date assignment, which can be accomplished (as we discuss later) without developing a detailed job schedule.