Procurement Management

The system is designed to allow your organisation to operate with the least amount of inventory, while maintaining management mandated service level goals. The system helps the buyer determine when to place an order and how much to order.

The primary function of the system is the automatic determination of when to place an order and how much to order. The system reviews every item daily, regardless of the vendor’s review schedule. This ensures that even on a non-scheduled review day, there is enough on-hand or on-order inventory to maintain service levels to your customers/stores.

• GUI front end
• Vendor Profiles
• Deals and Promotions
• Forecast and Seasonal trends
• Item and vendor substitution
• Billback tracking and reporting for vendor deals/promotions
• Investment Buy Recommendations
• On-line Investment Buy Simulations
• Relational Data Base
• Ability to review recommended orders by commodity group, allowing comparison of like items from all vendors
• Promotional / Ad Group Maintenance
• Vendor Managed Inventory Support
• User defined deal and purchase order history
• Multiple Item Descriptions
• Retail Pricing Support
• Lead Times by Day for each Vendor
• Inquiry of item movement week-to-date and year-to-date
• Suggested Order Review process with full truckload building capabilities
• Emergency Order Review
• Cross docked purchase orders
• Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)
• Purchase order management
• Ability to access all purchase orders containing a specific item
• Mass updates to item forecasts
• Future Item and Vendor Maintenance
• Two Years of Item Historical Data with Notes
• Unlimited Item/Vendor Relationships
• Multiple ways to categorize items
• Bracket Pricing Alerts
• Floor Stock Protection Support
• Vendor Delivery Calendar by Day

• Increased customer service levels
• Increased inventory turns
• Reduced inventory
• Improved ROI
• Maintains strategic service levels
• Consistent application of Management Buying Policies
• Improved buyer productivity
• Increased visibility to data
• Reduced errors
• Optimised purchase conditions

Data Base Management
Provides the users with the ability to manage critical vendor, item, deal and purchase order characteristics used throughout the purchasing system. The relational database allows for easy access to the data for query purposes.

Vendor Maintenance
The system maintains comprehensive information on vendor name and address, as well as other demographic information. Freight and payment term agreements and representative relationships are also established.

Item maintenance
The system provides maintenance of comprehensive information such as item description, category, cost, warehouse information, ordering information, point of sale characteristics and billing prices.

Deals and price maintenance
Supports eleven different deal types, bracket pricing based on order quantity and tracks bill back details.

Forecasting and Seasonal Profile
The forecasting function produces weekly forecasts of expected shipments. These forecasts are automatically adjusted based on actual movement each week. The technique draws on historical demand and movement data, and advanced statistical projections.

Allocation and order determination
The order determination function formulates and suggests turn orders from the forecast. The system refreshes and positions the entire list of suggestions every day. The order quantities are the amount of stock needed in excess of the available stock to fulfil a target service level.

Suggested Order Review
The system displays suggested order lists for every buyer by order of customer service. The list references and groups items under their primary supplier. As events change during the day, the buyer has the flexibility to re-run a suggested order for a vendor on-line and then review the new order immediately.

Investment (Forward) Buying
Investment buying focuses on meeting the best timing and overlap of buying opportunities to suggest investment quantities.

Purchase Order Management
Any Purchase order can be maintained up to the point of receipt. The various actions that can be taken are edit, delete, create and reinstate. Some of the data that is available to change is scheduled receive date and time, quantities, all cost elements and purchase order notes.

Management Support
SCM/400™ provides a robust range of inquiry functions that allow the user to access critical information pertaining to items, vendors, purchase orders and inventory.