Capable to Promise: Check the Order Before You Commit

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Estimated reading time: 7 minutes

Capable to promise (CTP) checks whether you can manufacture a requested quantity, and when, by considering both material availability and the production capacity needed to do the work. It gives sales a basis for a delivery commitment when the goods are not simply available to ship from stock.

The important moment is before you say yes. A customer’s requested date tells you what would win the order. Your standard lead time tells you what usually happens. Neither tells you whether this particular job fits alongside the work you have already promised.

SkyPlanner APS helps you make that check: schedule a draft order against the current workload, review its planned completion times and see the surrounding work in the Gantt schedule. Instead of reconstructing machine queues to answer sales, you can focus on the offer your factory can support.

Capable to promise vs. available to promise

Available to promise (ATP) asks how much supply remains available for a new commitment after existing demand is accounted for. That supply can include uncommitted stock and planned receipts, not just what is physically on the shelf today.

CTP adds the manufacturing question: if the finished goods are not available, can you make them with the materials and capacity available in the required time?

Question	Available to promise (ATP)	Capable to promise (CTP)
What supports the answer?	Uncommitted inventory and planned supply	Material availability plus the capacity needed for production
What does it help sales offer?	Quantity and timing from that available supply	Quantity and timing that additional manufacturing can support
When is the distinction useful?	Goods can be supplied from stock or expected receipts	The order still needs production or assembly on shared resources

ATP is useful when you can fulfill an order from available supply. CTP becomes especially valuable in make-to-order and assemble-to-order manufacturing, where accepting the sale creates work that must fit through the factory.

Having all the components does not mean you have room to assemble them. Equally, having no finished stock does not mean you must turn the customer away. CTP helps you find the opportunity between those two assumptions.

One new promise can put another at risk

Imagine a contract machine shop quoting a set of shafts and mounting plates. The material is available, and sales would like to offer Friday dispatch.

The shafts can be turned and inspected by Thursday. The plates need milling on a machining center already occupied by committed orders. Under the current sequence, they will not finish until the following week.

The order is not ready when its easiest item finishes. If the customer needs the complete set, the plates determine when that set can leave. A stock check would miss the milling queue; a standard lead time would miss the workload currently in it.

Moving the plates ahead might make Friday possible, but it could also delay an existing customer’s job. That is not free capacity. It is a choice about which promise takes precedence.

A useful CTP check therefore answers two questions together: when can this order finish, and what does making room for it do to the work already committed? Seeing both gives you a chance to win the new business without discovering its cost after confirmation.

Check the prospective order in SkyPlanner

SkyPlanner turns that question into scheduled work. Its scheduling AI, Arcturus, calculates the placement of operations using your configured production resources, dependencies and priorities. You see the resulting schedule rather than having to assign every operation manually.

For an order-promising decision, the practical sequence is straightforward.

Schedule the work sales is actually offering

Create the prospective order with Draft enabled and schedule it. Represent the requested items, quantities and required process steps, rather than testing a generic job with an average duration.

The useful inputs are the ones that could change your answer: which resources can perform the work, operation durations and setups, working shifts, material readiness and the orders already taking capacity. With material-aware scheduling enabled, Arcturus accounts for material availability as part of the calculation.

For the machine shop, this means scheduling both the shafts and the plates. Leaving out the slower route would make the proposed date look attractive without making the full order deliverable.

Read completion times, not just the requested due date

Once the draft is scheduled, SkyPlanner shows the Planned End Time for each order item. The latest item completion gives you the production-finish basis for a complete-order promise under the current workload.

Keep that result distinct from the customer’s receipt date. Allow for any inspection, packing, dispatch or transport time not already represented in the plan. Sales and production should be clear about whether the date being offered means ready for collection, dispatched or delivered.

This is the difference between entering a desired date and checking whether production supports it. You own the customer commitment; SkyPlanner supplies the scheduled completion times that help you make it credible.

Review the surrounding commitments

Use the Gantt schedule to review the proposed work alongside existing orders. If you change its priority to pursue an earlier completion, recalculate and check what else moves before agreeing to that offer.

You steer the priorities and can use locks to protect scheduling decisions. Arcturus handles the calculation within those instructions. That lets you spend the conversation deciding whether an expedited order is worth accepting, rather than manually rebuilding queues to find out what it would displace.

SkyPlanner integrates with any ERP or MES through its open REST API. You can keep your existing order-management system and connect it to the scheduling view needed for these delivery decisions.

Turn the result into an offer, not just a yes or no

If the requested quantity fits by the requested date without unacceptable effects on existing work, you have a stronger basis for confirmation. If it does not, the useful response is an alternative the customer can buy.

For the imagined machine-shop order, that might be:

• Offer a later complete delivery. Keep the existing commitments intact and quote the date supported by the slower plate route.
• Discuss a split delivery. If the customer can use the shafts independently, offer them first and the plates later. Confirm that a partial shipment has value before creating extra handling and freight.
• Assess an earlier date with a changed plan. An approved extra shift or a different eligible resource may help. Update the capacity assumptions and recalculate before selling the earlier date.
• Agree an explicit priority trade-off. If management chooses to advance this order, identify the affected commitments and deal with those consequences deliberately.

These are commercial decisions, not just scheduling adjustments. An expedited order that creates unpriced overtime, premium freight or disruption may be less profitable than it looks. Checking before acceptance gives you room to price the extra effort or negotiate a better date.

Keep the promise tied to the current workload

A quote based on yesterday’s schedule may no longer fit after another order is accepted or a material delivery slips. Recheck a prospective order if the assumptions behind its date change before the customer confirms.

Sales and production also need an agreed rule for tentative work. Decide which opportunities belong in the planning workload, who maintains them and when an unaccepted quote should stop influencing the plan. Otherwise, separate quotes can compete for the same apparent opening, or stale opportunities can obscure usable capacity.

Once work is committed, keep priorities, resource availability and material information current. The benefit of a calculated promise comes from checking against the factory you will actually run, not a plan that assumes every shift and delivery will happen as originally expected.

Better delivery-date setting in daily use

Eskomatic, a Finnish contract machining company, previously maintained work queues largely by hand in an older ERP and production-control system. Building an overall picture was slow, and limited material visibility could leave shortages undiscovered until close to a job’s start.

With SkyPlanner, its team gained a visual Gantt work queue and automatic load scheduling connected to existing ERP data. Eskomatic reports that the clearer production load makes realistic delivery times easier to see and helps it give customers more accurate dates. Production Planning Manager Tommi Männistö identifies delivery-date setting as a particular strength in daily use.

That is the practical reason to choose SkyPlanner for this problem: give sales an answer grounded in scheduled work, while freeing the planner from reconstructing that answer by hand.

Book a SkyPlanner demo and bring a prospective order, its requested date and the resource most likely to hold it up. Use that discussion to explore how you could check the offer against your existing commitments before confirming it. If you prefer to explore first, try SkyPlanner with demo data.