Handling the phase out of obsolete product

Has anyone found an effective why to sell out remaining inventory of a product being phased out?
Ideally, we only want to sell the quantity on-hand, then "automatically" remove the product from active service.
To us that means....
- continue taking new customer orders but only up to the on-hand quantity, and
- prevent new replenishment orders, ie. P.O.s for resales items and M.O.s for manufactured items.

We do suspend the item warehouse records which also prevents new customer orders and replenishment orders but usually leaves stray inventory on-hand. (We would like to prevent a customer orders for 10 when there are only 8 left.)

We still have some orders being entered in "green screen" sessions and the on-hand, on-order, allocated and available quantities are shown, but we would need something like the item number goes to "blinking and reverse image" to flag the item so that customer service doesn't have to slow down. We have talked about changing the description to start with "OBS" but really would like to help prevent over selling or being overly cautious and leaving obsolete material on the shelf and not put more things on the plate for customer service to have to remember.

I would really be interested to know how others are handling this situation.

THANKS
Roger Blocher

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Roger Blocher
Vice President of Information Systems
[cid:2__=0ABB0A6DDFD6A2498f9e8a93df93869091@local]
Technical Rubber Company, Inc.
9711 Sportsman Club Rd.
P.O. Box 486
Johnstown, Ohio 43031-0486
P: 1-888-433-8352
P: 740-966-8009
F: 740-966-8090
www.trc4r.com<http://www.trc4r.com>