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Automating purchasing and replenishment

HandiFox creates an information environment where inventory planning is rooted in data and strategy. The software tracks low stock items and collates sala data to form its own judgement on what your next purchase order should look like. For the automated replenishment to work, you need to determine ‘reorder points’ and ‘desired quantity on hand’ for each item across all warehouses.

Terminology: reorder point, desired quantity on hand, case site, reorder rounding

Reorder point is the minimum quantity that you would like to see on hand. When items hit this point, the system alerts the user through the ‘Items to order’ window on the main page (Dashboard) and suggests generating a purchase order (PO) to bring items back to their Desired quantity on hand (Desired QOH) - the target level that you also need to set beforehand.

To assign these values for your items, go to Inventory → QOH Viewer and click Desired QOH and Reorder Points. Select the Site for which you will be defining these parameters, then enter them in their respective columns. When you are finished, click Save.

To set reorder points and desired quantity on hand for all sites at once, select All in the Sites dropdown list and set the values. Note, that reorder points and desired QOH values which vary from site to site are shown as blanks - this way you know that you shouldn’t be editing them on this screen. If edited, they will be reset for all storage sites and made identical.

Some of our clients purchase and receive stock in case packs of several units (12х, 24x packs, etc). This puts their purchasing teams in the position where they have to constantly convert units into cases and the other way around, and also do the order rounding every time they check on-hand inventory or plan to place a replenishment order. To spare everyone the hassle, we introduced the ‘Case Size’ parameter and ‘Reorder Rounding’.

Case size shows how many units there are in one case. Rounding can be set to “to nearest”, “up to nearest” or “down to nearest” to let the system know how it should be rounding when calculating replenishment needs. When you generate a new PO the quantity to replenish and future needs will by the factor of case size and rounded as specified for the item.

As soon as you have provided your input on what can be considered low stock and the app has accumulated enough sales data, you can start exploiting automated replenishment. 

Generating purchase orders with HandiFox

HandiFox generates POs based on:

o  sales information for a chosen period. You can also make the system Include Future Needs on the order, provided your average daily sales rate will not deviate significantly from the one you had during the chosen period.

o  average weekly sales.

o  reorder points and desired QOH.

Alternatively, POs can be generated from scratch.

Head to the "Purchase Transactions" to see all POs and filter the list based on a combination of parameters. The "Save view as" button allows you to:

• Save filter setup to create shortcuts to the views you use the most

• Customize filter settings to see only select columns and sorting

• Share your views to a select group of users

• Set/unset your view as default

Read more on how to work with purchase orders in the Purchasing section of HandiFox Online Wiki. 

Key takeaways and action items:

1. HandiFox automates inventory planning and replenishment forecasting. To start using this functionality, set reorder points and desired QOH for all items on your list.

2. Create POs based on sales rates to streamline inventory planning. As soon as the software gathers enough sales data to work with, it will be able to work out which products need to be reordered to last a given number of weeks. .

3. You can rely on the app’s replenishment suggestions or create a PO from scratch in the web app or right on your mobile device.

4. Save filters to save time looking up for select types/range of POs.