Ship Dates for Special Order and/or Out of Stock Items

What is the 'NetSuite Best Practice' for setting the Ship Date on a Sales Orders when the items are not in stock?

We did look at 'Available to Promise' when we went live, but later turned it off as it doesn't automate anything, and the user interface for it is appalling (it's the same stupid tiny icon as the inventory detail icon - very small, difficult to click, and almost impossible to see any differences in the icons to show status etc.). From what I can remember, it was only based on the 'expected receipt date' of the item/supplier anyway, so no different to looking at the item / lead time etc.

Do you expect your sales staff to use 'Available to Promise' (or the expected receipt date of outstanding POs and/or lead time of items), and set the Sales Order Ship Date to match these?

Has anyone customised / automated this to automatically adjust the Sales Order Ship Date based on the item lead times?

Our issue with this process is that our picking process is based on the ship date of the order (I assume that is standard 'best practice' - but please correct me if I'm wrong!). So we won't even try to pick that order until the day before the Ship Date (we pick for delivery the next day). If the supplier delivers the items sooner than expected, or items are returned, or other orders are cancelled, or inventory counts find more stock, then the Sales Order will still not be picked until the day before the Ship Date.

We overcome these potential issues by leaving the Ship Date as the default 'next day' - the picking ticket won't print until the items are committed to the order, but will print as soon as items are available. This solves the problem above, but then makes it difficult to identify when a Sales Order is going to be 'late' (from the Customer's perspective), especially when Supplier order confirmations (or delays) change the PO expected receipt date.

We have customised the default 'Expected Delivery Date' on the Purchase Order to correctly calculate from the Item Lead Time (excluding weekends and non-working days - apparently NetSuite 'Best Practice' assumes that the Procure to Pay process works 7 days per week). We have chosen to add a custom field to record the 'Supplier Expected Receipt Date' - which is the date the Supplier gives us on the order confirmation (and may update when there are delays etc). This seems logical to keep the original date (that is essentially the Suppliers Service Level Agreement') to help track Supplier performance. It is also used for Goods In to be able to see a realistic estimate of the dates goods are arriving.

I'm trying to set up a system whereby when we are notified of a change to the Supplier Expected Receipt Date, we can notify the sales teams of Customer Sales Orders that will be affected by this, and they can discuss new ship dates with the Customer (if relevant). Seems like this should be something that just 'works' as part of the NetSuite 'Best Practices', but I feel like I'm fighting the system all the way......

Please somebody tell me I'm missing some obvious built in features that will make this all work correctly and logically.