For the purposes of this document, we will only be discussing the processes that are involved in purchasing items for stock from vendors.

Vendor Quotes

This is an optional step that may or may not be utilized at your company. As the name implies, rather than requesting goods from a vendor, this area is used to just request costs for the items that are included in the quote. After the costs have been provided by the vendor, you can then elect to release the quote into a regular purchase order.

For some companies, due to the nature of their business, this is the typical beginning of the purchasing process. For most companies, this process will only be used when introducing additional items and/or a new vendor into the system.

Replenishment

Although this step is entirely optional, it is highly recommended. This process will analyze all of the items that fall under your filter criteria and determine not only if they need to be purchased, but also the quantity that needs to be purchased.

Regular stock, as well as special orders, are evaluated and will be displayed for your review. When the worksheet has been completed, the process will produce all required:

• Purchase Orders
• Rework Orders
• Kit Orders
• Warehouse Transfers

Purchase Orders

This area can be used to manually create a purchase order. It can also be used to view and edit purchase orders that were created by the replenishment process and from within sales order special order lines.

Typically, sites that use replenishment have very little reason to use this area. Conversely, sites that don’t use replenishment will do almost all of their purchasing from this screen.

Rework Orders

A rework order is a special type of purchase in which you send one or more items in your inventory to a vendor that transforms the goods into another item. The vendor may be assembling many of your items into a single item or they may be performing some type of transformation to individual items such as adding a coating.

Aside from the special nature of the outgoing and incoming items, this area is functionally the same as a regular purchase order.

Purchase Order Printing

This is an optional step. This area is used to send purchase orders to vendors. It automatically brings up all documents that have not yet been sent to their respective vendor. Sites that utilize replenishment can use this screen to print, email, or fax their purchases in a batch and ensure that no documents are overlooked. Sites that do manual purchasing can also use this area, but typically send their documents from the purchase order screen itself.

Expedite & Follow-up

This is an optional step. This area is used, as the name implies, to expedite and follow-up on purchase orders. This can be used to verify that the purchase order was received by the vendor, availability of product, and shipping dates. Any notes taken in this screen are also available for viewing in the Incoming Stock inquiry in Dynamic Inquiries.

Purchase Order Receiving

This is a mandatory step. This is the final step in the purchase order process regardless of how the purchase was initiated. The receipt of goods is verified, and a put-away report can be generated. The end of this process leads into the first steps of the Accounts Payable Process.

Rework Order Receiving

This is a mandatory step for rework orders. Like the purchase order receiving step above, this is the final step of the rework order process.