A protocol for the order commitment decision in a supply network

Timely and accurate order commitment decisions are important to supply networks. Many firms face problems such as order over-commitment and inability to fulfill committed orders. Addressing shortcomings in the state-of-the-practice, we developed a protocol based upon the distributed database two-phase commit protocol that guarantees the atomicity of global transactions. We developed extensions of the basic protocol based on requirements of experienced supply chain professionals. Supply chain managers experienced with order promising evaluated the protocol. They opined that adoption of this protocol would reduce the decision-making time by 80%, enhance the accuracy by 30% and also improve customer service levels.