One of the most common customer inquiries is: When will my order be shipped? Similarly, suppliers frequently ask: When will we receive our materials? And on a daily basis, production teams face the challenge of when will products be ready? At the heart of these questions lies a critical element: dates. A company's Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system relies on accurate dates for material planning, capacity planning, and available-to-promise logic to ensure smooth operations.The way an organization manages and maintains these dates directly impacts on-time shipment performance, supplier reliability, and production timelines. To ensure the system's effectiveness, everyone involved in the supply chain — from planners and schedulers to buyers, customer service reps, and production personnel — must understand how these dates affect the entire workflow. If these dates become inaccurate or are misused, system data can no longer be trusted, leading to reduced performance.In this session, we will break down the three key date types — request, promise, and current — and discuss important distinctions such as on-dock vs. off-dock dates and the role of transit times. You’ll learn how to properly capture these dates in an ERP system, the essential user-defined fields, and how to handle date-change rules. Most importantly, we will share a proven methodology for ensuring date accuracy and discuss performance metrics for tracking shipping, supplier deliveries, and production completion.
