1. Purchase Orders and Contracts User Guide
  2. Overview

1 Overview

This guide discusses purchase orders and contracts in the Retail Merchandising.

Purchase Orders

Purchase Ordering functions control procurement of stock for retail.

Purchase orders in Merchandising provide support for capture and view of several ordering related attributes such as shipping information, import attributes, Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS), expenses, letter of credit information, and partner information. Inventory Management parameters such as scaling, truck splitting, supplier minimum, and rounding percentages may also be defined and enforced at the order level.

Purchase Orders can be created through automated or manual processes. Automated orders are largely generated by the replenishment processes. Manual Orders may be raised for ad-hoc purchases against contracts and from replenishment generated Buyer Worksheets.

The ordering screens also provide usability enhancers such as diff distribution and pack templates to ease the process of order creation.

Purchase order receipts (Shipments) record the increment to on-hand when goods are received from a supplier. Weighted average cost (WAC) is recalculated at time of receipt using the PO landed cost. Transaction audit records are created for financial audit, and the receiver is made available for invoice matching. Open to Buy limits are discussed as a precursor to order creation.

Automatically Generated Purchase Orders

Purchase orders may be automatically generated through several ways:

  • Replenishment: When inventory levels reach a point determined by the replenishment method assigned to an item, a purchase order can be created in Worksheet or Approved status.

  • Investment Buying: When the investment buy calculations indicate a benefit to the company by purchasing additional inventory, a purchase order can be created in Worksheet or Approved status.

  • Vendor managed inventory (VMI): If your supplier uses a VMI system, the supplier can create purchase orders in Worksheet or Approved status.

  • Truck splitting: When a purchase order is split into two purchase orders to accommodate truck splitting, a purchase order can be created in Worksheet status.

  • Warehouse Stocked/Cross Dock Docked Stock: Accumulates store need at the item/location level. If the need cannot be fulfilled by the warehouse, a worksheet PO is created.

Manually Creating a Purchase Order

In addition to auto generation, purchase orders can also be created manually in Merchandising. After creating the purchase order and specifying the header details, you would then need to add one or more items to the purchase order and distribute those items to one or more locations.

You can create the following purchase orders in Merchandising.

  • Order/Import Order

  • Contract Order

  • Order for Contracted Items

  • DSD Order

  • Pre-issued Order

  • Purchase Order for a Pack

  • Customer Order