We don’t currently use PO Suggestions, but are starting to experiment with it (In a Test DB, of course).
Is there a setting somewhere, that controls the Approved flag on new PO’s generated from PO Suggestions?
Or is the Unconfirmed flag the main (and only?) way of finding PO’s generated from suggestions?
Also, we have a lot of BTO items on orders, and always make a separate PO for each Sales order. For example SO’s 12300 and 12301 both have parts that come from supplier XYZ. When we manually create PO’s, we’d make two PO’s - one for each order.
It looks like Generate PO’s will combine items for different SO’s on the same PO - when the Supplier AND need by date are the same. (this correct?)
Epicor’s PO Suggestions feature is one of the strongest features of the software, and is a great time saver. I say “Buyers should BUY, they should not be data entry people typing POs”.
Epicor can take the “Suggestions” and automatically generate all the POs as you have found… and it will consolidate like items when it finds that efficient.
There is a trick to keep them from getting combined, and that is to make something unique for each one. One company I know wanted the same thing, so they made a BPM fire on all BTO Materials on a JOB, and in the Purchasing Comments added the Job Number… if the purchasing comments are different, then it creates different PO Lines. I believe that you can probably do the same thing on the sales order.
Tim - does that “unique comment” trick only work to keep from combining the same part into a single PO line?
I want to keep different (or same) Parts that will be purchased from a vendor, on separate PO’s. Seems as though I’d have to do something that would be unique at the header level.
Good question… the Unique comment will keep the suggestions from getting combined into one suggestion… but to keep the PO Headers separate, it is a little manual tweak… only “Buy” one of those lines at a time…
in PO Suggestions, Select the item
Choose Actions:Generate PO
Repeat for additional items.
each time you Generate POs, it starts with new headers. If you select multiple parts from the same supplier, then it will combine them.
Drop ship POs work fine… Sales Orders that are “Purchase Direct” as well as Drop shipped will generate a PO that is marked correctly. You still must “receive” the PO, which starts the ship/invoice process.
I have never had anyone ask for drop ship landed cost transactions. I believe that the only way that we support landed cost is with the container shipments (I may be wrong here). If that is the case, i don’t know if/how it would work to generate the landed cost. Never tried.
Keep in mind that the strategy behind PO Suggestions is MOSTLY to make the BUYER’S life easier, by combining as much as possible into as few POs/Lines/Releases as possible.
In the scenario you describe (with NO special settings on part XYZ-123 Sites tab), there will be a single PO with a single line and two releases, one for each requirement date.
If the “Days of Supply” field has a number greater than its default of 0, then the releases will be combined as that field creates a range of days.(and your demands are only 1 day apart).
With zero QOH, Min/Max/Safety will not affect the creation of the suggestion, but would affect the quantities purchased. Also Re-Order to Max will affect the PO quantity as well.
Lead time affects the date the suggestion is created for (if today were 5/1, your demands are as you say, and there is a lead time of 5 days then your PO suggestion would say “this doesn’t need to be purchased until 5 days before the demand date”,
Max Qty, in my experience, only directly affects the “Re-Order to Max” calculation. It does not limit the size of the PO suggestion. I’m not sure what else it’s SUPPOSED to do, but that’s what I’ve found in practice.
@ckrusen, you best approach to better understanding of this is to actually create several scenarios and prototype this. @Ernie gave many of the things to check, but there are lots of tweaks and variances that can change the results.
Two orders for two different customers both for the same part on different days
Two orders for the same customer for the same part on different days
Two orders for the same customer for the same part on the same day
The above 3 examples may or may not generate different POs depending on settings on your system for Days of supply, addresses being shipped to, etc.
So, in this case, do as I did (and still do) to learn MRP/Purchasing… Create the scenarios, push the buttons and run tests… you will see how it works.
