Purchasing, Transfers and Manufacturing Orders

We have seen above how Acumen can place supplier purchase orders, transfer orders and manufacturing orders when requested to for the supply of products for a customer order. Many businesses also require the ability to order to stock.

Acumen can also fill this role with the automatic ordering function. Control may be exercised over the items that may be ordered for any location, who their supplier will be, at what price, and to what minimum and maximum order values are allowable. At the end of the automated ordering phase, Acumen presents a number of suggested purchase, transfer, and manufacturing orders required to restock to your desired stock levels.

There are many controls that Acumen provides to allow you to be more accurate in the placement of purchase orders. Acumen's main tenets in automatically raising purchase or manufacturing orders is to make sure we have enough for our needs but on no account is it to over-order. Some of the controls used to do this are minimum stock holdings, months of sales required to be held, maximum months of sales, re-order frequency, supplier lead time, pack quantities, economic buy quantities, supplier preference, percentage of supply from this supplier, estimated stock at the time of delivery, seasonal factors, customer orders, transfer requests, other purchase orders, overstocks at other branches, and period for which the order is being placed.

Each of the above factors is individually assessed for each product and each branch before deciding if and how many items should be purchased and from whom, thus building a number of orders on the various suppliers for those goods required to be placed at this time. In the case of Manufacturing orders, these orders may cause additional manufacturing orders and supplier orders to be raised if a manufacturing order requires a product that itself has a materials list, and so on to as many levels of sub assembly as required.With Acumen, purchasing may be carried out at each individual branch, by head office on behalf of each branch or for all branches if the company uses central warehousing, or any combination of the above with some central warehousing, some head office bulk purchasing for the branches, and some branch initiated purchasing. All the data transfers and documentation controls are automatically maintained by the Acumen system irrespective of the type of system, being on-line or distributed in nature.