Overview
Purchase Plans show the future orders and deliveries calculated daily by AGR from the newest available data, such as stock levels and the demand plan.
Purchase plans can be used in different ways.
Example use cases
The best way to understand purchase planning is through examples. Several are below.
Share purchase plan with vendors
Predictability is valuable to your vendors. By sharing purchase plans with them, you can help them make sure that they have the products in stock when you need them. In exchange, you might be able to negotiate lower prices with the vendor or priority over their other customers.
You can easily export any purchase plan to Excel, filtered to a single vendor.
Resource planning
If the purchase plan view is configured to include Estimated Future Deliveries and Undelivered, outstanding orders already placed but not yet received, then it's possible to see how many units are expected to be delivered to a location on a specific date. This allows resource planners to manage the receipt of stock into their location.
Vendor Planning
To ensure that you are managing the risk of your purchases across a range of suppliers, a view can be configured at the vendor level without the need to show item level detail. This view can be tailored to any time period to show the estimated future orders predicted for any vendor. You may wish to review the plan to ensure that you aren't ordering large amounts from any one vendor in any one month in case that vendor won't be able to deliver, impacting your ability to sell in the following period.
BOM demand insights
BOM Demand of BOM components is derived from the Estimated Future Orders of BOM products (finished goods). You can compare the Estimated Future Orders of BOM products to the BOM demand shown for BOM components to trace where the BOM Demand is coming from. This is particularly useful when a component is used in multiple products.
Set up your planning view
Before you start reviewing your purchase plan, it is important to know why you are reviewing the purchase plan to ensure that you set up a view fit for your the task. This includes
setting the period filter to display your planning time,
adding the right set of columns to set the planning level e.g. all items for one vendor or a summary of proposed purchases for each vendor, and
grouping the data by the right time bucket (day, week or month).
Read more on how to customize your planning view here.