Purchasing Enhancements

I understand that there are some changes planned to the purchasing tool and thought it would be useful to see if anyone one else would see a benefit from some of the features that we have identified as being important to us. I am not sure how unique we are, but to give you a feeling, we have more than 100 active vendors, and a part time purchasing team of 1, managing a very seasonal business. It is therefore possible to manually accomplish almost all of this, but most often it is not practical or possible to do so. Therefore leveraging technology to do this seems like an efficient solution.

1. Currencies

We have many suppliers in different currencies. It is important for clarity to be able to provide a Vendor with a PO in their own currency ( so it matches any price sheet) but to be able to account for it internally and for repricing etc reflecting the true cost in our "Native" currency.

2. Validating Invoices against PO's.

We need to make sure that we only get charged for what we receive, for the agreed price (and that the price in RO is correct), that we had ordered it in the first place, and that we only get billed for the same item once. We find achieving this in RO right now a very long winded and manual process. We have many small PO's often with multiple deliveries per PO, further confusing the issue. There should be a step within RO, after Product receiving, to assist in quickly validating this information before any invoice is further processed into accounting.

3. Tiered pricing

Lots of our vendors offer pricing discounts for either orders of a certain size or on certain quantities of a SKU. This may be a lower unit cost, a % discount or free carriage. It would be good to have visibility of this in purchasing and if possible use an algorithm to calculate the value in "padding" the order to get to the next tier.

4. Min order thresholds

Some of our vendors insist on a minimum order value. It would be good to have this visible with the PO view, and possibly have an automated threshold to increase quantities to meet this.

5. Bulk Quantities

Some of our vendors supply us only in case quantities. If we need to buy in a specific multiple, and PO's should be rounded up to the next value

6. Multiple Routing Guides

We have very different requirements for the different vendors we use depending on their location, the type of product they are shipping and the sort of relationship we have with them. It would be very useful to have different routeing guides available to use with specific vendors or groups of vendors.

Does anyone else think these would be beneficial to them?

Are there any other features that you think are important in the next generation of this tool?

Jason

November 09, 2016 23:04

Timely topic, we have a couple of FSAs outstanding for related topics.

No need for us on this, as we only purchase in one currency, but I can definitely see how valuable this would be. How do you manage exchange rates?

2. Validating Invoices against PO's

Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes! I'm not sure I can offer more emphatic support for this but this is probably the MOST needed upgrade on our end (across the entire product).

Invoice Reconciliation is on the road map, but I've mentioned to a couple of RO employees that I would sponsor this feature (in full or partially) if that would move it up the list.

This is a critical component for any retailer, so users either don't recognize that (and are losing money every day as a result of mis-shipments from vendors or invalid invoices), or are doing what we are, which means investing 3-4 hours every week to review and match invoices.

I realize this is actually a really hard one to tackle, especially without a direct accounting integration to export data automatically because you have to deal with changing COGS and inventory values, but it's super important.

Anyway, needless to say I complete support this.

Not many of our suppliers offer this, so not 100% relevant for us, but again, if you need it, I can see how this would be a complete nightmare, especially with respect to how it impacts #2 above.

Yes, this is critical, and really should not be THAT difficult from a development standpoint to implement.

Yes the ability to order in both case and lot quantities is super important for us. Again, should not be all that difficult to implement (I wrote this functionality for our last ERP, and if I can do it then it should be less than 5 hours from start to finish).

Agreed, this is support for Drop Ship Purchase Orders, so only stands to reason that this should be extended to be unique for each vendor.

In addition to the points you've raised, I think the SKU Vivification task (on the road map) that would allow us to build POs by SKU rather than MPN (with a one to many relationship for vendors that supply that product) is critical.

Additionally:

Ability to import POs from a CSV.
Enhancements to product grid when building a PO to be able to see current QOH for a SKU as well as Quantity on Order.

Would love to see some progress made on these items. Much of the rest of RetailOps is mature and incredibly functional (especially WMS), but purchasing needs an overhaul in my opinion.

Purchasing Enhancements

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