Most of us know that you can create production orders from sales orders in Microsoft Dynamics NAV. When doing this the production orders are reserved against the sales order lines and they also inherits the dimensions from the sales order lines. The quantity on the production orders equals the base quantity on the sales order lines and the due dates of the production orders becomes the shipment dates backdated by the default safety lead time defined in the manufacturing setup.

For make-to-order environments this is great and creating the production orders from the sales orders quite often becomes the handover from sales to production.

But what about if there already are some items in inventory available that can be used to fulfill part of the ordered quantity?

If you for example sell 10 bicycles and there are already 3 in inventory, then you might only want to produce 7 new bicycles and use the 3 already in inventory to fulfill the order. The way to handle this is to first reserve the 3 bicycles in inventory against the sales order line and then afterwards go and create the production order. This way the production order is only created for 7 bicycles.

Here is how to do it:

A sales order for 10 bicycles is entered in Dynamics NAV.

You can see in the fact box to the right that there are already some bicycles available in inventory (since you only missing 7) and decide to use those to fulfill the order by reserving them against the sales order line.

The way to reserve the 3 in inventory is to click Functions and Reserve…

In the reservation page you will see the 3 as available Item Ledger Entries (e.g. on hand inventory) and by using the ‘Reserve from Current Line’ function you can reserve those against the sales order line.  The ‘Reserved Quantity’ then gets updated and you can see the rest in the ‘Unreserved Quantity’ field.

On the sales order line you will see a total of 3 in the ‘Reserved Quantity’ field.

You have now reserved the 3 bicycles in inventory against the sales order line. The production order is then created for the remaining 7 bicycles using the Order Planning functionality.

On the sales order line you will see a total of 10 in the ‘Reserved Quantity’ field.

When making a drill down in the ‘Reserved Quantity’ field you will see the reservation entries that shows you the 7 against a firm planned production order and the 3 against the item ledger entry.

From there you can navigate to the production order that is for the 7 bicycles.

That was basically it! If you don’t reserve the 3 bicycles before you create the production order Dynamics NAV will create it for 10 bicycles instead of 7.

The production then owns the process to produce the 7 bicycles and once it is in stock they will be shipped together with the 3 that came from inventory.