Orders

Building an order without comprehensive item substitution is like driving with blinders because it’s impossible to know what you can do with the inventory you have.  BizAutomation takes the blinders off, by giving you the insight you'll need to know what you can and can’t substitute based on the individual needs of each sales-order and work-order. This shortens fulfillment and production times, while reducing inventory carrying costs:

Substitutions can be used to relieve back-orders, optimize gross-profit, discover upgraded or downgraded alterntives across all warehouses:

• Hard-Allocated Substitutions - When substitutions are generated from alternate warehouses, you can hard-allocate to order, which prevents the risk that it can be accidentaly allocated to another order.
• BOM Substitutions - Clears production bottle-necks created from back-ordered BOM parts or materials. 
• Sub-Assembly Substitutions - Replace back-ordered sub-assemblies with off-the shelf builds, or substitue the BOM items causing the back-order in the first place.
• Kit Substitution - Kits are composite items and can also be substituted based on the same process used to replace BOMs and Items.
• Substitute to increase GP - Presents equivelants with a greater gross profit such as generic branded, or white labeled alternatives.
• Substitution policies - Define and enforce customer policies governing which SKUs or Manufacturers can or can't be used in a substitution.

Document Uploader - Upload one more document files to any order, including PDFs, images, or MS Office files such as Word and Excel.

BizDocs - BizDocs are online documents built by BizAutomation which inherit data from orders, so they can be exchanged with other modules the system. For example a Packing Slip "BizDoc" can create an "Invoice" BizDoc during fulfillment, which is then converted to a PDF and messaged out to the customer when an order is shipped.

BizDoc Customization - BizDocs can be customized in any number of ways, depending on their intent. For example, an Invoice BizDoc can have multiple templates to express different branding strategies.

Document Messaging / Email - Email out any document attached to the order including BizDocs at the click of a button, or automatically via workflow automation triggers. Each time they're sent, the email event is added to the order's correspondence history which is a log that shows who sent what, to whom, and when.

Link Sales-Orders to Purchase-Orders & Cascade-updates across linked Records & Documents (Invoices, Quotes, POs, etc..) - When orders are linked, BizAutomation manages cascade update logic (e.g. editing qty in an SO updates the item on the linked PO). This includes all the validation and verification to ensure that POs sent to vendors and Invoices sent to customers are locked and protected from cascade edits.

Generate Invoices on linked Sales Orders from Vendor Invoices on linked Purchase Orders - After vendors ship and invoice, generate invoices on linked Sales Orders, including all the including the ship-via, ship-service, shipping cost, tracking #s, and relevant costs used to drive customer shipping prices according to customer shipping terms (Invoiceable and Non-Invoiceable shipping costs, margins, etc..).

Customer RMAs / Returns

• Can be issued separately, or combined into split orders
• Dynamic Ship-to - Enables the ability to RMA items to your warehouse or a 3rd party vendor, even on drop-ship orders, depending on an item's declared condition, availability, and sellability. Avoiding costly shipment layovers at your warehouse, bypasses delays, reduces labor costs, and helps to keep in-demand stock available.
• Warranty - Governs an RMAs expiration by product group.
• Eligibility - When product is shipped back to your warehouse, during the receiving process, your staff will be able to inspect product to issue eligibility conditions, which combined with warranty coverage, drive credit memos and refund eligibility.
• Re-Stocking Fees for eligible returns - Implement re-stocking fees on returned items which you can include in the RMA PDF design. Fees will be automatically removed from the CM or Refund issued.
• Refunds & Credit Memos - If approved, refunds & credit-memos can be issued from the RMA within the order (permission gated).

Price Rules - The price rule wizard provides a matrix of variations, such as quantity range, product or product groups, and relationships (e.g. My Gold customers get a better price than Silver tier customers). Conflict management resolves the potential for two pricing rules that seemingly contradict from getting in the way of a sale.

Price Levels & Tiers - Set quantity or amount ranges that are set within the item records themselves. These tables can be easily updated using the update wizard.

Cost + Margin driven Price Formulas - If your organization uses this method of pricing, it can be set to dynamically update based on dynamic cost updates, or calculate from period based static cost. This method fluctuates profit margins during the price period rather than cost which is needed when contractually committing to price lists for a period of time.

Promotions Management - Impact the opportunity / quote with promotion rules that can layer on top of the pricing foundation already laid. Use date ranges for temporary discounts. Set rules such as “IF X happens, THEN discount Y”, etc.. Multi-currency can also drive pricing depending on base and alternate currencies (contact us for details).

Cost Transparency - Every line item within every order has permission enabled cost source, which you can use to show transparency within the order’s gross profits and sales commission calculations. Cost sources can include vendor costs from tables dynamically generated from individual purchase orders, or from directly linked dropship or Directship purchase orders.

BizAutomation’s Allocation management helps you get as close as possible to achieving what are two seemingly contradictory goals: maximizing order ship-date accuracy while minimizing the risk of stockouts.

Hard Allocation

Prevents the age-old problem of losing your ability to ship an order on-time because what was available when the order was created goes on back-order by the time it’s fulfilled. Works equally well with partial or ship-complete order mandates.

Prioritize allocations for key accounts: 

• Outbound pick to ship – Reserves partially or fully available stock from the time an order is generated. Enables warehouse staff to fulfill hard allocated orders before all others.
• Inbound pick to ship – Because inbound back-order purchases take longer to fulfill, you’ll have the option of Dropshipping or hard allocating on inbound stock, for orders awaiting shipments based on distribution list priorities.

If you manufacture: It’ll keep production lines moving by immediately committing BOM picks to work-orders from stock, while also committing and routing inbound BOM stock from POs, immediately from the moment it’s received and put-away.
Because work-orders can link to sales-orders, and can be hierarchical, where a sub-assembly of a parent off-shoots to a work order to build it to meet the demands of the parent work-order – BizAutomation’s hard allocation capabilities are an absolute must-have.

If you configure or build kits: If your organization builds kits, you already know how quickly things can go south when and you have, say 15 out of the 20 kit members in stock, which can get even more dicey if those back-orders have to be purchased from multiple vendors.
Our hard-allocation capabilities address this issue by reserving kit components at the time of pick-to-kit on the outbound side. Simultaneously, we reserve incoming inventory from vendor shipments based on their expected receive dates, directing each shipment to the designated assembly location as it arrives.

If you regularly transfer inventory for order fulfillment: You’ll have the option to receive to order from the destination warehouse.

Multi-Dimensional Soft Allocation

Order allocation is typically a single-dimension affair based on FIFO ship-dates where oldest orders ship first. But what if your least profitable, smallest customer put in their order a day before your biggest more profitable customer for the same item and there’s only a single unit in stock ? It’s an extreme example but wouldn’t you rather know ? Taking the blinders off is exactly what BizAutomation’s multi-dimensional soft allocation modeling let’s you do.

Allocate based on your priorities, with 15 possible combinations. For example:

• Ship-Dates
• Items or orders with the highest gross-margin or revenue come first
• Prioritize customers with the greatest revenue spend
• Combine multiple dimensions in a sliding scale such as “Big Customers first, THEN ship-date, THEN gross-profits", etc..