Working with the Purchasing tab

The Vision purchasing tools provide you with tremendous flexibility for your purchasing needs. These tools help you to:

Streamline your purchasing activities across all warehouse and store locations.

Minimize inventory levels and maximize sales service levels.

Respond to the changing demands, including seasonal requests, of your customers.

Buy ahead of vendors' price increases to minimize costs.

Consider manufacturer lead time when deciding when to purchase.

And much more.

During End-of-Day processing and during on-demand stock replenishment, the system identifies products in need of replenishment. In some cases, the system creates a replenishment transfer order to move products from the replenishment warehouse to the warehouse that needs the products. In other cases, the system creates pending purchase orders (POs) for needed products and places the POs on the Replenishment Action Report. The report is sorted by vendor, and each PO directed to a vendor is given its own PO number. A recommended order amount is included for each item. Your company's purchasing manager analyzes this report and decides which POs to edit, activate, and send to the vendor.

During End-of-Month processing and during on-demand ROP / EOQ recalculations, the system recalculates the various replenishment factors for individual products. The system uses these replenishment factors during End-of-Day processing and during on-demand stock replenishment to identify products in need of replenishment.

Following are descriptions of the screens available on the Purchasing tab.

Screen name

Purpose

File Maintenance

This screen is divided into two panes. Click the Maintenances folder in the left pane to expand its contents. Then click a subfolder to expand its contents, and click one of the items in the subfolder to view details about it in the right pane.

The Maintenances folder is where you access the following maintenances:

Purchasing Schedule: Use this maintenance to set up a weekly schedule to replenish only the products that meet certain criteria—vendor, product class, product type, and ABC code—on certain days.

Note: To access the Purchasing Schedule maintenance, you must have the proper security privileges. The Purchasing Schedule job function needs to be assigned to one of your roles. Roles are assigned to users in the User Maintenance on the Security Maintenance screen of the Vision Configuration tab. For more information, refer to About roles and job functions.

ROP Factors

This screen is where you can set up and maintain three ROP factors for a product: the safety stock quantity, the ROP quantity, and the linepoint quantity. You can specify different quantities for different warehouses to reflect different product usage in your various warehouses.

If you have a product in your system that has not generated enough usage (that is, if few or any customer orders have been placed for this product in a particular warehouse), you may want to manually set up quantities for the ROP factors on the ROP Factors screen and set what is known as a freeze date. Before the system calculates the ROP factors for a product in a warehouse during End-of-Month processing and during on-demand ROP/EOQ recalculations, the system checks for a freeze date for the warehouse product:

If a freeze date exists and it is sometime in the future, then the system does not recalculate the ROP factors for that warehouse product; instead, it uses the quantities manually set up on the ROP Factors screen.
If a freeze date does not exist, or if the freeze date established is today or in the past, then the system continues processing with the standard calculations for the ROP factors of the product.

The ROP Factors screen is also available on the Product Management tab.

Note: To access the ROP Factors screen, you must have the proper security privileges. Either the Product Maint (Global) job function or the Product Maint (Warehouse) job function needs to be assigned to one of your roles. Roles are assigned to users in the User Maintenance on the Security Maintenance screen of the Vision Configuration tab. For more information, refer to About roles and job functions.

ROP Model

This screen enables you to:

Set up and modify reorder point (ROP) models consisting of different ROP rules. The rules are based on manufacturer, product class, product type, and ABC code.
Access the Average Monthly Usage and Reorder Point Classifications Calculation dialog box, which you can use to establish and modify settings for calculation of average monthly usage, safety stock, reorder point, and/or linepoint.

You can set up and maintain ROP models and assign them to one or more warehouses. During End-of-Month processing — and whenever the ROP/EOQ recalculation is run on demand — the system checks for changes made to the ROP models and updates average monthly usage quantities and reorder points for every affected product.

Note: To access the ROP Model screen, you must have the proper security privileges. The ROP Maintenance job function needs to be assigned to one of your roles. Roles are assigned to users in the User Maintenance on the Security Maintenance screen of the Vision Configuration tab. For more information, refer to About roles and job functions.

ABC Model

This screen enables you to:

Set up and modify ABC models consisting of different ABC rules based on manufacturer, product class, and product type.
Access the ABC Classification dialog box, which you can use to set up or modify product selection criteria that the system can use to assign ABC codes to products.

ABC models are used to rank products based on average monthly usage during a rolling 12-month period in one or more warehouses. The system then assigns ABC codes to products based on those rankings. The ABC codes can be used to determine how much of stock product to buy and when to order to assure the right turnover. In addition, the ABC codes can be used to perform velocity pricing. (For more information about ABC codes and velocity pricing, refer to Modify a pricing model.)

Note: To access the ABC Model screen, you must have the proper security privileges. The ROP Maintenance job function needs to be assigned to one of your roles. Roles are assigned to users in the User Maintenance on the Security Maintenance screen of the Vision Configuration tab. For more information, refer to About roles and job functions.