Available-to-Promise¶

Gate every new delivery commitment against a date-bucketed residual curve — on-hand plus scheduled receipts minus prior promises — so a request is accepted only if no future bucket goes negative, distinguishing what is physically present from what is contractually free.

Version: v4 · 2026-09-28 · History · 2 corrections
Domain-specific #: 71
Domain group: Professional & Organizational Practice
Origin domain: Logistics & Supply Chain Management
Subdomain: Supply Chain Planning → Logistics & Supply Chain Management

Core Idea¶

Available-to-promise (ATP) is the supply-chain calculation determining how much of a resource a seller can commit to deliver by a date without breaching prior commitments. The classical formulation runs a time-bucketed ledger: on-hand plus scheduled receipts, minus quantities already promised, yields the residual available to accept new commitments per bucket. A request is granted only if the cumulative residual in the promised bucket and in every later bucket stays non-negative; otherwise the earliest feasible date is quoted.

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What's Left to Promise

A toy shop has 10 teddy bears, but 7 are already saved for kids who asked first. So the shop can only promise 3 more to new kids. If more bears are coming next week, the shop can promise those for next week. Available-to-promise is counting what you can still promise without breaking the promises you already made.

What We Can Still Promise

Available-to-promise, or ATP, is how a business figures out how much it can promise a new customer by a certain date without letting down customers who already ordered. It takes what's on the shelf plus what's scheduled to arrive, and subtracts what's already been promised, day by day or week by week into the future. A new order is only accepted for a date if there's enough left over then and in every later period after taking it out. If not, the business offers the earliest date it can actually deliver. This is different from just checking the shelf, because some of what's on the shelf may already belong to someone else.

Commitment-Aware Availability Check

Available-to-promise (ATP) is the supply-chain calculation of how much of a resource — finished goods, production capacity, or staff hours — can be committed for a given date without breaking earlier commitments. The classic version keeps a ledger in time buckets: on-hand inventory plus scheduled receipts in each future period, minus quantities already promised, gives the amount still free. A new request is accepted only if the cumulative leftover in its delivery bucket and every later bucket stays non-negative after deducting it; otherwise the earliest feasible date is quoted. The key idea is separating what physically exists or is expected from what is contractually free, which a simple stock check misses. Every promise is a deduction and every cancellation a credit, so one running balance tells anyone quoting what they can safely commit. ERP systems build it on the master production schedule, and the same logic appears in hotel and airline reservations and cloud-capacity quotas.

Available-to-promise (ATP) is the supply-chain planning calculation that determines how much of a resource (finished-goods inventory, production capacity, staffing hours) a seller or scheduler can commit for delivery by a given date without breaching prior commitments. In the classical MRP/ERP formulation, a time-bucketed ledger computes, for each future period, on-hand inventory plus scheduled receipts minus quantities already promised, yielding the residual available for new commitments. A new request is accepted only if the cumulative residual in the requested delivery bucket and in every subsequent bucket remains non-negative after the deduction; otherwise the earliest feasible date is quoted. The structural commitment is deducting prior promises from physical availability across a forward horizon before any new promise, which separates what is physically present or expected from what is contractually free, a distinction naive stock checks collapse. Promises are deductions and cancellations are re-credits, maintaining a single authoritative residual curve any quoting agent can read without consulting individual orders. In manufacturing ERP systems, ATP is a standard module built on the master production schedule, and the same cumulative-balance gate appears in hotel and airline reservations, cloud-capacity quota management, and professional-services staffing.

Scope of Application¶

Because ATP is a calculation, not a mechanism, it applies wherever its precondition holds — a replenishing resource pool, a forward stream of scheduled increments, and a stream of prior commitments drawing the pool down.

Manufacturing and supply chain — the canonical home, ATP modules gating quote-and-promise against the master production schedule.
Hospitality and travel — hotel and airline yield management, with overbooking the deliberate no-show-parameterised violation.
Cloud and IT capacity — committable capacity per region/instance-type from a fleet curve minus reservations.
Restaurant, event, and professional-services — table residuals and billable-hours pipelines.
Public-service scheduling and personal calendaring — surgery-slot and docket ledgers; the degenerate committed-hours case.

Clarity¶

ATP brings one distinction naive stock-checking collapses: physical availability versus contractual availability (stock and receipts minus what is already owed). It reframes capacity from atemporal to time-indexed — the answer is a residual-promiseable curve, not a scalar — and isolates the one invariant to protect: no negative residual in any future bucket.

Manages Complexity¶

A tangle of receipts, promises, cancellations, and reschedules collapses onto one authoritative residual curve, read directly for commitability. The agent tracks that curve and one invariant, from which a clean date-indexed branch (promise / earliest-feasible-or-partial / decline) reads off mechanically, with two simple postings keeping the curve authoritative.

Abstract Reasoning¶

ATP licenses a diagnostic inferring contractual state from physical stock (detecting the overpromise), an interventionist posting of promises and cancellations against the invariant (with partial-split and overbooking variations), boundary-drawing on the fungibility assumption, and forward propagation of promise cascades when receipts shift.

Knowledge Transfer¶

ATP is a calculation, so it transfers literally wherever its precondition (a shared replenishing pool) holds — its real and considerable reach across manufacturing, travel, cloud, and staffing. The honest boundary is instrument-reach versus over-reading (the gate is exact only for a fungible pool); its transferable content factors into the parents Commitment, capacity, ledger, Scheduling, and overcommitment.

Relationships to Other Abstractions¶

Current abstraction Available-to-Promise Domain-specific

Parents (2) — outgoing typed relations

Available-to-Promise includes Commitment Prime

Available-to-promise contains the standing and proposed delivery commitments whose dated deductions define contractual rather than physical availability.
Available-to-Promise includes Scheduling Prime

ATP contains a constrained scheduling calculation that assigns an acceptable request to its requested or earliest feasible delivery bucket.

Neighborhood in Abstraction Space¶

Available-to-Promise sits in a sparse region of the domain-specific corpus (61^st percentile for distinctiveness): few abstractions share its structure, so a faithful description tends to retrieve it precisely.

Family — Supply Chain & Inventory Management (29 abstractions)

Nearest neighbors

Demobilization — 0.86
Backorder — 0.85
Wholesale-Funding Run — 0.85
Capital Stock — 0.85
Phantom Inventory — 0.84

Computed from structural-signature embeddings · 2026-10-25