The Sourcing table is used to define sourcing policies:

• What products are shipped
• Who the products are shipped to
• How to choose where the products are shipped from

Properly defined sourcing is required to visualize connections on the GIS map.

Column	Description
Delivery Destination	Defines who the product is shipped to. It can be any facility (Customer, DC, or Factory), except a Supplier.
Sources (Source in GFA)	Defines possible sources (or a single source in case of the GFA scenario type) for the specified product. It can be any supplying facility (defined in the DCs and Factories, Suppliers and Groups tables), except for a Customer. A supplier cannot be set here if you are working in the GFA type of scenario. You can use the following techniques when working with the drop-down list of possible sources: To set / unset a facility as a source, select / clear the checkbox next to the list item;
Product	The cell contains a list of products (defined in the Products table). The product for which the sourcing policy is being defined.
Type	[Available in Simulation-based experiments] Defines the sourcing policy or in other words the sources to order the products from. First Cheapest Closest Fastest Most Inventory (Dynamic Sources) Uniform Split (Multiple Sources) Split by Ratio (Multiple Sources) How it works: The user selects specific sites that should be considered as possible sources in the Sources column. Then the sourcing policy chooses the source from the user-defined sources, which best satisfies the specified criteria. Users may use their own custom sourcing policies. Once added, they will be available in the bottom of the policies list
Parameters	[Available in Simulation-based experiments] Defines parameter values for the Split by Ratio and custom policy types only.
Time Period	The time period during which the sourcing policy will be considered. The cell contains a list of periods (previously defined in the Periods table).
Inclusion Type	Defines the status of the given sourcing policy: Include — include this sourcing policy into supply chain configuration. Exclude — exclude this sourcing policy from supply chain configuration. If selected, the table record will be grayed out to denote the current inclusion type. The table record stays editable.

There are three groups of policies:

• Fixed Source group — at the beginning of the experiment the specified policy chooses one source. It will be the only source the customer will be using during the whole experiment.
• Dynamic Sources group — in contrast to the Fixed Source policy, the source is chosen anew for every new placed order, so the source may change during the experiment according to the current situation (depending on the current inventory level of the source at the order generation).
• Multiple Sources group — in this case all the available sources will be supplying the customer simultaneously, i.e., the demanded amount of products will be split between the available sources either equally or as defined by the user.

In case of dynamic sourcing policies the best source is selected by its current inventory level of the required product — only the sources with sufficient amount of products are considered.

Please note the group the policy belongs to

First — chooses the first source (in the order of appearance) from the list of possible sources selected in the Sources column.

Cheapest — every user-selected source is considered by its transportation costs (specified in the Paths table). The cheapest source is chosen.

Closest — chooses the closest source to the customer.

Fastest — the source is chosen in terms of the delivery time.

Most Inventory (Dynamic Sources) — Chooses the source with the largest available volume of the product (e.g. the customer ordered 10 items and the selected sources may offer 10, 7 and 10 items respectively. The second source will be omitted because it does not cover the ordered amount. Since more than one source satisfies the demand and both of them contain similar volumes, random source will be chosen among them).

Uniform Split (Multiple Sources) — The demanded amount is split equally among the available sources, which simultaneously supply the customer. For example, if the demanded amount is 200 and there are 5 available sources, the customer will receive 40 items from each source.

Split by Ratio (Multiple Sources) — The demand is split among the available sources according to the ratio defined in the Parameters column.

Split by Ratio parameters

• Drop order if source is unavailable — the toggle button defines if the demand of the unavailable source must be dropped or distributed among the rest of the available sources.

  E.g. Let us assume that the demanded amount is evenly split among 5 sources, and one source is unavailable. If the toggle button is enabled, one fifth of the demanded amount will be dropped. If the toggle button is disabled, one fifth of the demanded amount will be distributed among the available sources.

• Site — the sourcing facility supplying the customer
• Ratio — the demand percentage that will be supplied by this facility. You may specify any numbers here, they will be normalized by the experiment. For example, if you have 5 DCs with ratio set to 5, 15, 7, 1, 9, the experiment will bring those values into alignment by diving each number by the sum of all the values (5 / 37, 15 / 37, 7 / 37 etc.)

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