Procurement - Inbound Logistics

Procurement, Vendor Mgt, & Demand Planning

Key take-aways:

Ultra-precise Cost Management - Compare and contrasts vendor costs, terms, & distance, vs demand across orders, replenishment formulas, & historical trends to maximize cost savings
Demand Planning & PO Generation - Multi-dimensional forecasting lets you weigh procurement decisions against every contributing factor, then orchestrates related processes across related objects such as POs, SOs, items, & warehouses
Vendor Management with Payment Automation - Pick the right vendor according to the various needs of a procurement profile. Reconcile vendor invoices to POs, set approval workflows, and release payments via ACH

Purchase Order Management - with approval-workflow

Purchase-Orders can be created Manually & Automatically from:

Approved Requisitions	Mass-POs from the Demand-Planner... learn more
Sales-Orders & Work-Orders	Reorder-Points & Replenishment formulas
External Connection (e.g. EDI, API, etc..)	Multi-PO Consolidation from the Cost Optimizer
Business Process Automation rules	Purchase Opportunity “Deal-Won” conversions

PO & Vendor Bill Approvals
Enables systematic review and authorization of Purchase-Orders and Bills, ensuring proper oversight and spending control.

Traceability & Accountability

Audit Trails - Most orders go through constant modifications until they’re closed. Order auditing lets you track every modification made,
who made it, and when. It’s available at the click of a button from anywhere in every order.
Receive Receipts & BOLs - Track when purchase orders are fully or partially received. Un-receive from the purchase order, with audit trails
for both. While receiving inventory, warehouse staff can include the Bill of Lading or Packing Slip ID for future reference.
Hard-Allocation - Assures that inbound vendor shipments linked to sales-orders are protected from being picked by other orders.
Landed Cost - Including shipping, insurance, and customs duties, in order to realize the total cost of your purchase items. Costs can be
allocated across items using multiple allocation methods including weighted amount, cubic size, and weight.
PO-SO Synchronization - Real-time, bi-directional updates between purchase orders, sales orders, and related documents such as
Quotes, POs, Order Confirmations, etc.. ensuring data consistency and accuracy across the entire order management process.
Includes all validation logic to ensure that documents such as Invoices are not impacted by changes.

Purchase Order Consolidation & Volume Discounts

Merge & Cost Optimization Module

Purchase Orders can undergo an intermediate step that consolidates and optimizes POs prior to vendor dispatch.
This intermediate step streamlines operations and reduces expenses.

Purchase-Order Consolidation - Merge multiple POs into one to increase economies of scale / cost reductions.
Discount threshold insights - Brings awareness to discount thresholds during the buying process.
Data-mine purchase history - Leverage historical prices paid to recommend discounts on open Purchase Orders.

Dropship Management

BizAutomation's dropshipping Dropship Management capabilities can be used for traditional 'fill in the gap' operations, but where they really shine is when employed as a high-volume force multiplier. In this context, sophisticated distribution and branding strategies, vendor contracts, and the ability to streamline end-to-end business processes across all integrated front and back-office modules can be utilized to their full potential.

Complete Dropship Lifecycle Management - from start to finish

Sales-Order Flexibility

Vendor to Customer Dropship - Create dedicated dropship sales-orders or mixed directship (you fulfill) warehouse to customer and vendor to customer dropship sales orders, with split-fulfillment workflow.
Warehouse to Customer’s Customer Dropship - Create Sales Orders that ship to multiple addresses. Store and re-use up to thousands of shipping addresses per customer.

Procurement Logistics

Single Address PO from SO Dropship - Create dropship Purchase-Orders from individual Sales Orders, which is particularly useful in high value complex B2B orders requiring deeper management (e.g. projects and tasks, etc...).
Mass Dropship - Combine Dropship together with Directship demand to maximize your organization's procurement economies of scale, as a strategy to drive down costs.

Vendor Contracts

OEM Private Label & Blind-Shipping – Auto-create branded or un-branded Packing-Slips for Vendor POs.
Support for Multi-Customer-Ship POs - Supports multi-ship POs with customer and warehouse ship-to addresses.
Blanket Orders - Incorporate Dropshipping into yearly and bi-yearly commitments via blanket order contracts.

Financials, Dropship-RMAs, & Workflow-Automation

Auto-Create Customer Invoices from Vendor-Bills - Includes shipping and tracking from shipment within customer invoices, with mutual link between bill and invoice for future reference.
Reconcile Customer & Vendor Shipping-Terms
Dropship RMAs - Workflow driven RMAs can ship-to your organization or the vendor depending on situational criteria.

Blanket Orders - from Purchase Contracts

If your organization has volume discount contracts with vendors for frequently purchased items that are purchased over an
extended period of time, BizAutomation’s Blanket Orders will help you manage them.

Capabilities

Consolidated Master Blanket Purchase Orders - Including all requisite details memorialized in the contract such as items,
quantities, and release date schedules.
Demand Plan Aware - Demand planning purchase formulas will be Blanket Order aware. By incorporating items and quantities
committed to blanket order contracts, double purchasing of items already scheduled against Blanket Orders is prevented.

Vendor Management

Purchase Incentives & Cost Optimizations

Vendor Purchase Incentives with Cost Analysis

Leverage purchase incentives within consolidated or individual purchase orders, based on discount thresholds via purchase amount or quantity within procurement plans.
Use Incentive-Forecasting to help guide procurement decisions based on amounts and quantities needed to reach discount thresholds.
Use Vendor Analysis within demand planning to choose ideal vendor per item purchase based on analytics such as profit margin, branding, and private label availability.

Vendor Cost Management - When Purchase Orders are generated, vendor cost is automatically updated by line-item for the specific quantity level the purchase belongs to, providing the latest vendor cost table updates without needing to manually update them via CSV upload (which is also supported). Audit trails will report automated and manual edits (e.g. who / when cost changes).

Late turn-around Follow-up - Follow-up with vendors that have missed their “Expected” ship dates. You can use this together with see linked sales orders (SOs) to review SO ship-dates that may be delayed as a result.

Vendor RMAs - Returns Management

Create business rules that:

Determine return conditions eligible for credit memos and refunds.
Define what warehouse receives returns based on RMA conditions, item performance, and order type such as directship or dropships (Including internal, 3PL, and Vendor Warehouses).
Drive vendor scoring

Vendor RMAs / Returns with Receive Condition Eligibility - Once an RMA is issued, eligibility rules can be assigned to enable warehouse staff to conduct quality inspections in order to determine credit memo or refund eligibility. With RMA eligibility, your organization can not only save money, you’ll also be able to track back problematic vendors and items. For more details,

Warranty Policies - Assign warranty policies to shape the eligibility of RMAs.

Vendor Scoring & Segmentation

Vendor scoring will help you pick the right vendor for the right procurement opportunity.

On-Time Delivery - Actual vs expected/requested ship dates.
Actual Lead-Time - Actual vs estimated lead times.
Estimated Lead Time - Expected based on ship from / to geographies.
Defect Rate - QC rating will tell you an Item’s defect rate.
RMA Rate - How does the vendor/OEM score on purchase returns.
Profit Margin - How a vendor’s profit margin ranks vs competing vendors/OEMs.
Vendor Segmentation & Tiering - All organizations can be segmented into custom-defined profiles. With vendors, perhaps you want to create a set of business rules that favor high scoring vendors with high quality ratings differently than those with poor quality scores.

Vendor Bill-Pay

Paying vendor invoices is as easy as 1, 2, 3, with BizAutomation removing the drudgery with automation:

Step 1 - BizAutomation inbox receives vendor invoice, which is scanned via OCR & AI.

Step 2 - Invoice is analyzed against matching PO, inconsistencies flagged, then approver is alerted.

Step 3 - Once reconciled and approved, invoice is paid, usually via bank to bank ACH.

Multi-Ship Procurement

The fulfill by Amazon DC model is being emulated by more and more vendors because it increases customer loyalty while maximizing bulk discounts for their customers, a win for all.

Here's how BizAutomation can help:

Multi-Ship Vendor Configuration - This way vendors that don't conform to DC conditions are filtered out from Multi-Ship demand plans
Multi-Ship Purchase Orders (PO) - These are special POs you can send as PDFs that include a break-down of line-items, sub-divided by quantity to ship to each location, ship-to locations, and if vendor shipping terms enable them, carrier and ship-service details
Dropship & Directship consolidation - Supporting demand from dropship customers alone within a single DC PO can be challenging, but adding a multi-warehouse ship-to from a directship demand can add another layer of challenges. BizAutomation can manage both.

Demand Planning

Leverage your economies of scale to reduce costs, and optimize inventory with predictive demand intelligence.

Precision Demand Forecasting from:

Backorders
Seasonality & Volume Trends
Confirmed orders & ship-dates
Demand from future ship-dates
Re-order-point triggers based on dynamic rolling averages

Segment or Consolidate qty by:

Warehouse and/or Dropship Demand
Item Group
Sales-Opportunities nearing completion
Demand Ship-Date Range

Flexible Purchase-Order Mass Generate to:

Multi-Ship from Vendor to all Ship-to destinations
Single-Ship from Vendor to Distribution-Center (DC)
with Receive & Transfer or Receive & Ship workflow capabilities

Demand to Procure Guidance along the way

Replenishment formulas
Purchase quantity recommendation