Product Suggestions
It is quite common place in the wholesales and distribution market for customers to order very large quantities up front but choose to either deliver to multiple locations and/or in multiple smaller batches over many months.
Supermarkets often do this for seasonal items, ordering a smaller number outside the main season to establish their "Initial Price" allowing them to then sell the larger quantities at a discount. These supermarkets don't want to hold the stock in there warehouse during this time.
It is often the case however that those customers will change their delivery quantities and schedules depending on how well they are selling etc.
Taking this into account with regards to the available stock calculations is very difficult and providing some useful insights to the purchasing/manufacturing departments would make a great feature.
i have had a few conversations over the last couple of weeks with customers who would find this useful
I think at lot of customers would like this feature. We might need to consider how different this really is to pre-season? is it the same by another name? are we just missing the ability to part-confirm a pre-season order? do we need to add an option for "Call-off-commitment" that works exactly like preseason but makes sense to customers that do "call off" rather than "pre-season" (even if we can't tell the difference !!)
We might have to offer options to include these types of call-off quotes as reserved stock, or count them in our pre-season calculation. I could see customers wanting to do either. For some this will be a reserved order, for others it's a more vague pre-season quote.
I also think you need to be able to manually specify the delivery schedules instead of having to add the same product multiple times.
And, most importanly, perhaps the thing pre-season is missing, to be able to confirm 100 of the 400 committed. We'd want to know the original commitment amount (400), the ordered so far (100) and the oustanding (300). It probably doesnt really matter if the original quote is done as a normal quote, or a pre-season or a call-off order - either way you could imagine hitting "confirm" and having an option to "confirm all items and quantities" or "Confirm part of this quote" and it then letting you choose lines/quantities. It would probably be fine if the 100 ordered went on a seperate order with maybe a link back and a running total of the oustanding vs the commitment on the "original" order / quote / pre-season order.