Operations

Promise the date you can actually make

Sales quotes a date from what the ERP shows as stock. What the ERP shows is not what is free: part of it is reserved for orders already placed, part of it is on its way out this afternoon, and the replenishment that would cover the rest is coming from a supplier who has been two weeks late all year. Every one of those facts sits in a different system, so the date gets promised on a quarter of the picture and corrected on the day of shipment. Coheed assembles the whole picture before the promise leaves the building.

Systems combined
CRMERPSCM
Runs
Continuous, on quote and order changes

Sound familiar?

Teams bring us this use case when one or more of these is true.

  • Delivery dates are promised from stock figures that turn out to be reserved for someone else.
  • Customers are called back with a new date more often than anyone is comfortable admitting.
  • Sales asks planning to check availability by hand, and gets the answer a day later.
  • Nobody can say, at the moment of quoting, whether a date is safe or optimistic.

How it works

Coheed runs this as an event-driven insight on every quote and order change, then hands the result to an agent.

  1. 1

    The real availability picture is assembled

    Free stock and existing reservations from supply chain, open sales orders that will consume the same stock from the ERP, and confirmed inbound purchase orders with their expected arrival, combined into one position per item instead of four partial ones.

  2. 2

    Inbound dates are corrected for reality

    Expected arrivals are adjusted using each supplier's measured delivery record rather than the promise on the purchase order, so a supplier who is structurally late does not silently make your customer promise late too.

  3. 3

    Where a planning system exists, capacity is included

    For work that has to be made rather than picked, open work orders and remaining capacity are taken into account, so the date reflects both having the material and having the room to process it. This step needs a planning system with routings and calendars; where planning is done in a spreadsheet or on a board, the answer covers material availability only, which is already the larger half of most broken promises.

  4. 4

    The insight becomes an action

    Every quote and order gets a date that holds, or an explicit shortfall showing what is missing and when it lands. Orders whose date is no longer achievable are handed to an agent that prepares the customer update before the customer calls.

Which data it uses

Only the fields this use case needs are read. Nothing is copied that the insight does not use.

CRM

Open quotes and their requested dates, the account, and the agreed terms that apply to it.

ERP

Item master, open sales orders and order lines, confirmed purchase orders, and customer pricing and agreements.

SCM

Stock positions per location, existing reservations and allocations, inbound shipments, and supplier lead times.

Coheed

The cross-system item and order links, and the measured supplier delivery record that corrects the promised inbound dates.

What changes

What a team notices once this runs. No invented percentages: the effect depends on your data and your process.

  • The date on the quote and the date on the shipment start agreeing.
  • Shortfalls appear while the quote is still open, when there is still a choice to make.
  • Sales stops queueing for a manual availability check before it can answer a customer.
  • Delivery reliability becomes something you can promise on rather than apologise for.

From insight to action

Delivery Promise Agent

Available as an agent

Watches open orders whose promised date has become unachievable, prepares the customer update with a realistic new date and the reason behind it, and proposes the alternative where one exists. The message goes out only once a human releases it.

Mode: Human-in-the-loop

Every insight can stay read-only, run with human approval, or run autonomously. You decide per action type, and you can change it later.

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

Our ERP already has an available-to-promise function. Why this?

An ERP's ATP works on what the ERP knows, and it takes the supplier lead time in the item master at face value, which is where most broken promises actually come from. Correcting the inbound dates with each supplier's measured record is the main thing this adds. Where your systems track reservations and allocations, those are read too; where they do not, and plenty of SMB ERPs do not, free stock is derived from stock minus the open order lines that will consume it.

Does this slow down quoting?

No. It follows quote and order changes rather than running as a separate step, so the answer is there while the quote is being written instead of a day later from planning. How fast depends on your systems: those that push change notifications land in seconds, those that have to be polled land within the interval you set, typically minutes. Either way it is ahead of the person writing the quote.

What happens when a date genuinely cannot be met?

The shortfall is made explicit: which item, how much is missing, and when it realistically lands. That is a far better conversation to have while the quote is open than on the day of shipment, and it is often the moment a customer accepts a partial delivery or an alternative.

Which systems does it need?

An ERP and the system that holds your stock positions and reservations is the minimum. Adding the CRM puts the answer where quotes are written, and adding production planning extends it from having the material to being able to make it.

See this on your own data

Tell us your ERP, CRM, and SCM stack and we will show what this use case looks like on your systems.