How many units of Product X can you ship next week? The answer seems straightforward - check stock, give the number. But that number is wrong the moment you give it, because it doesn't account for what's already promised.

The Problem with Raw Stock Numbers

You have 5,000 units of Sunrise Body Wash in the finished goods bay. A sales team checks stock and commits to a customer order for 3,000. An hour later, another rep checks the same stock number - still showing 5,000 - and commits to 4,000. You've now promised 7,000 units against 5,000 in stock.

This happens every day in organizations where "available" means "what's physically on the shelf" rather than "what's not already spoken for."

What ATP Actually Calculates

Available-to-Promise is: current stock, minus reserved quantities (for confirmed production orders and committed customer orders), plus expected incoming supply (purchase orders and production order outputs), evaluated at a specific point in time.

It's a forward-looking number. It tells you not just what you have now, but what you'll have available after accounting for everything that's already in motion.

ATP at the BOM Level

For manufacturers, ATP gets more interesting at the product level. If a finished good requires five raw materials, the ATP of that product is constrained by the material with the lowest relative availability. You might have unlimited packaging, but if you're short on one chemical input, your product ATP drops to what that input can support.

FalOrb calculates ATP at both the item level and the product level, giving production planners a real-time view of what they can actually produce - not what they theoretically could produce if everything were available.

The Bottleneck View

When ATP is zero, the natural question is "why?" FalOrb identifies the constraining material - the bottleneck that limits production capacity. This transforms a vague "we can't make it" into a specific "we need 200kg of Palm Oil before we can start this run," which is an actionable procurement signal.

The factory floor doesn't need more data. It needs the right number at the right time. ATP is that number.

FalOrb's ATP engine calculates real-time material availability at both the item and product level, identifying bottleneck materials that constrain production capacity.