SIM Item Request and RMS replenishment attributes

Team,I was testing the following scenario and the results have me puzzled. Here is the scenario.....

1. Created Replenishment Attributes for an item on April 16th with an Activate Date of April 23rd. I did this using the Replenishment Form in RMS by adding an Activate date. I did not use the Replenishment Scheduled Update.
2. A record for the item \location was written to the REPL_ITEM_LOC table and the Next Review date is April 23rd.
3. In SIM, I created an Item request for this item with a requested delivery date of 4/16. I was anticipating that RMS would create a one off PO for this item. Instead the request was sent to the Store Orders table.