Using container heel properties

The

container heel

is the specified quantity of inventory within a container that cannot be removed as part of a material addition. For material addition binding, the container is effectively empty when inventory drops below this level.

Material distributions do not have a use for the heel property. When the total amount of inventory in the container is less than the heel property, the container is not empty. The selection of the container for a material distribution must follow the binding rules for distribution binding by container type.

For a container to be considered a binding candidate for a material addition step, the total of all inventory of the same material within a container must be greater than the container’s heel property.

When the quantity of inventory within a container is less than the heel property, the container will not be considered available for binding. This prevents containers that are effectively empty from being reselected to add material to a batch.

Composite Container Example:

Composite containers have only one sublot. The total inventory is the quantity of that sublot.

Plug-Flow Container Example:

Plug-Flow containers may only contain one material, but may have many sublots. The sublots are assigned ascending ordinal values as they are put into the container. Sublots are assumed to be consumed in ordinal order, lowest to highest value, thus creating a first in/first out (FIFO) queue of inventory. Consumption may span multiple sublots.

Total inventory is the sum of all sublots within the Plug-Flow container.

Pallet Container Example:

Pallet containers may contain any number of materials, and may have many sublots. In the example below, there are six sublots of Salt and two sublots of Pepper. The sublots are assigned ascending ordinal values by material as they are put into the container. Sublots are assumed to be consumed in ordinal order, lowest to highest value, thus creating a first out, first in queue of inventory. Consumption may span multiple sublots.

Total inventory is the sum of all sublots of the same material within the within the Pallet container. The example pallet has three total inventory values; Salt: 600 pounds, Pepper: 200 pounds and Sugar: 80 pounds. The heel property, 99 pounds, is applied to each of these materials. Considering only the Total Inventory/Heel Property rule, this pallet would be a binding candidate for material specifications for Salt and Pepper, but not Sugar.