Suggestion: Add a buyer field to supplier entry, which is used for PO suggestions. Every company I’ve worked at had specific suppliers assigned to each buyer. Why not drive that right from the supplier setup?
Companies I have worked at have different divisions but same company (not multi-company/multi-plant) and have separate buyers that buy from the same supplier. This wouldn’t work for them.
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Beth - Good point. Maybe a blank would work for all (or system default buyer with all other buyer added as authorized), or set it up under the Plant/Site tab?
It would be nice to have the subcontract purchase suggestions go to the correct buyer instead of everyone.
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I have ran into this as well and I got as far as scoping a customization for it and then the project was dropped. The buyer could be assigned at the Supplier level or the Purchase Point, since Part sourcing can be defined by PP on the Part Site record.
Anyways, the concept is that, like anything else in Epicor there is a hierarchy for value selection, from least specific to most specific.
Epicor’s current logic is roughly as follows:
- Part/Site
- Part Class
- Primary Buyer
Basically adding a Supplier/PP Buyer assignment would result in the following:
- Supplier PP
- Supplier
- Part/Site
- Part Class
- Primary Buyer
This would be that WHEN a Supplier/PP Buyer is assigned, it will use that instead of the settings on Part/Site or Part Class. The only issue I ran into was that I could see cases where some would want the logic to work differently, where the Supplier PP/ Supplier Buyer would be used as a override to the Part/Site or Part Class IF the Supplier PP/Suppler Buyer is set, otherwise use the normal selection.
I could see where the preference on how a customer would want this to work to really vary, even within the same company. A company/site setting for Supplier precedence might help, but not in a mixed environment. Perhaps this is why Epicor has not tackled it. Thoughts on varying options?
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Rick - Thank you for sharing. For those situations outside the hierarchy, I would leave the most specific levels blank, defaulting to the level above it. It might not work for 100% of cases, but meet the 80/20 rule which would be good enough for me, and get folks to use PO suggestions for subcontract operations. We’ve been without it for 3 years, so what’s a few more 
We assign a default buyer to all PO suggestions, and then change the buyer when creating PO’s. All the suggestions can be viewed en masse.
The buyer can be added to the system in a manner that would sub-divide by suggestions, but I’ve not seen that in practice.
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This can “kinda” be done by assigning the Buyer to the PART CLASS… that way all “Glass” would be part of the glass class, and (maybe) all purchased from the same glass supplier… all metal parts would be in the metal class… so on…
This does not force it down to the supplier level, but gets it closer.
I am thinking that it might be possible to create a BPM that looks at each PO suggestion as it is created, and flip the buyer code to the same buyer as stored in a customer Vendor.BuyerID_c field.
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Thanks Tim,
If I get more rumblings from the natives, I’ll look into the BPM. I’ll check w/ the purchasing team if part class would work for subcontract.