Inventory Replenishment - Sage MAS 500/ Enterprise Software/ Software Review-2020software.com

Sage MAS 500 - Inventory Replenishment

Module

Reduce Costs and Improve Customer Service

The Sage MAS 500 Inventory Replenishment module provides two powerful unique competitive advantages to your organization. First, forecasting can help accurately predict what customers will buy, reducing inventory carrying costs of unwanted goods while ensuring that you can provide customers the items they demand. Second, automated procurement ensures that purchase orders and transfer orders are system generated to reduce labor costs and ensure accuracy. Unparalleled cost calculations ensure that transaction and overhead costs are minimized by creating optimal orders for each vendor.

Knowing what to stock or build to meet your customers’ demands is one of the most critical decisions you can make in your business. Too much stock can result in lower margins, high inventory carrying costs, and excess damage as stock remains in-house too long. However, shortages can be even worse, as customers who can’t get an item in a reasonable time may call your competitors. Fortunately the forecasting capabilities found in Sage MAS 500 can help you meet this demand-planning challenge by providing flexible calculations that can be adjusted by warehouse, customer, season, product group, or every individual item. This provides maximum flexibility — and more importantly for your customers and your bottom line, accurate inventory planning.

Once a forecast is firmed, the Inventory Replenishment module automatically creates purchase orders, reducing human involvement and the related costs. Replenishment can also be used to automatically move stock between warehouse locations, a valuable feature for centralized hub-and-spoke distributors. Suggested orders are created for items that are required in the immediate future. However, Inventory Replenishment goes far beyond other automated procurement systems. Before a purchase order or transfer order is created, it also takes into account lead times for that vendor, the overhead costs of placing purchase orders to minimize costly low-volume orders, and whether it makes economic sense to purchase other products from that vendor at the same time.

In short, Inventory Replenishment offers the strongest supply chain-centric forecasting and automated procurement tools available today.Powerful Forecasting

Forecast future demand for inventory items.

Adjust forecasts for seasonal factors.

Tailor system calculations to match your unique business practices.

Minimize inventory carrying costs by accurately stocking your warehouses.

Automated Procurement

Automatically generate purchase orders and/or transfer orders based on forecasts.

Minimize handling costs by grouping items by vendor.

Determine optimal purchase amounts based on Economic Order Quantities (EOQ) calculations or thresholds.

FEATURES:Accurate Forecasting

Calculate Future Demand for Items

Determining how much of an item you will sell is critical to controlling costs while keeping enough stock to keep customers happy.
Configure the demand calculation to meet your business requirements.

Use demand formulas for product groups, even down to individual items.

Factor seasonal adjustments in calculating demand, such as holiday items.

Compensate for product lead times.

Calculate Demand from Project Estimates.
Adjust Demand for Exceptional Events

Inventory Replenishment can monitor and report unusual usage for an item, so that you can determine if you need to adjust the demand for the item.
Create low and high exceptional usage thresholds for each warehouse.

Monitor usage exceptions with an Unusual Usage Report.

Adjust demand for an item when exceptional events occur, such as a large one-time order, so that future demand calculations are more accurate.
Improve Customer Service

Ensure that stock of critical items will be available when the customer needs them.
Maintain optimal stock levels of key inventory items.

Provide stock availability with Capable To Promise (CTP) features.

Automated Procurement

Purchase the Right Amount

Let the system calculate how much to purchase of each product, based on user-defined input that best suits your business practices. Four popular methods are provided:
Generate purchase quantities based on Economic Order Quantity (EOQ), factoring in the item costs, the costs to process and receive purchase orders, as well as inventory carrying costs.

Set minimum/maximum purchasing rules for low volume items, ordering up to the maximum quantity when stock falls below the minimum.

Optionally keep stock at a maximum level and only order when it falls below those levels — ideal for high volume or perishable items.

Of course, you can always manually calculate how much to purchase of any item.
Advanced Calculations

Inventory Replenishment provides tools to minimize processing and carrying costs while ensuring that the items your customers need are on hand.
Accommodate a supply of safety stock for each item based on actual usage or prior vendor lead time performance.

Let the system calculate how often you should order from each vendor, to balance ordering and receiving costs against inventory carrying costs.
Single Screen Planning

Generate actual orders and firmed orders from a single point of entry.
The system determines demand for all items purchased from a vendor to consolidate them on a single purchase order.

Optionally review suggested purchase orders as a double-check.

Replenishment can also create suggested transfer orders to move stock from centralized warehouses to subsidiary warehouses. This feature is an excellent tool for hub-and-spoke, centralized distribution.

The planner can firm planned orders or create actual orders from system-generated planned orders.

Late orders are flagged for quick identification.

The planning screen displays summary and detailed item information including on-hand balance, adjusted on-hand balance (including safety stock), warehouse location and more.

Use MRP versions to generate specific material or distribution plans for each distribution center and another for the centralized or global plan.