Disruptions to the supply chain can have a ripple effect that impacts businesses of all sizes and industries. When disruptions occur, it is critical to have a plan in place to mitigate the damage and keep your business running as smoothly as possible. This blog post will discuss supply chain disruptions and how you can use supply management applications and strategies to help minimize their impact. We will also look at how Acumatica, one of the most popular supply management applications and ERP platforms in the market today, can help in this process.
Purchasing and sourcing
A good purchasing and sourcing strategy is the first step in mitigating supply chain disruptions. This strategy should include a robust vendor management program that can help you identify potential risks and take steps to avoid them. You should also have a system to monitor your suppliers and their performance.
Acumatica’s functionality can help:
• Vendor Management—Acumatica allows you to customize vendors by vendor class. It also imports vendor product catalogs with pricing lists and establishes vendor contacts and payment information.
• Purchase Orders—Acumatica can generate new purchase orders, copy them from prior ones or templates, or automate them depending on inventory levels.
• Blanket Orders—The software provides vendors transparency into future demand by setting up blanket orders for long-term contracts.
• Requisitions—Acumatica automates vendor bidding and approvals for both stock and non-stock items. It can also request emails from suppliers, gather bids digitally, and convert winning bids into vendor records and purchase orders immediately.
• Drop-Shipments—To drop-ship items from suppliers directly to customers, Acumatica creates vendor purchase orders linked to sales orders.
• Vendor Managed Inventory—Acumatica’s unlimited user licensing and cloud architecture allows suppliers to keep track of product inventories. It may also notify vendors of low stock, allowing them to submit purchase orders through Acumatica for buyer approval.
• Consigned Inventory—Acumatica’s cloud architecture makes it simple to keep track of consigned goods before selling or using them.
• Intercompany—A purchase order in one company may be converted automatically into a sales order in another with Acumatica.
• Procure-to-Pay—Using artificial intelligence and machine learning, automate vendor relations with procurement-to-payment efficiency.
Inventory management
Another critical aspect of mitigating supply chain disruptions is effective inventory management. Having a good handle on your inventory can avoid stock-outs and other issues that can arise when disruptions occur.
Acumatica’s functionality can help:
• Vendor Items—Vendor part numbers can cross-reference internal items.
• Inventory—Acumatica can manage your inventory effectively with linked purchasing, sales, project accounting, production, service, construction, and financial systems.
• Kit Disassembly—With the kit disassembly activity, Acumatica can return kit components to stock.
• Physical Inventory—To improve order management, the software uses the physical inventory program to verify stock validity.
• Warehouse Management—With the mobile warehouse management solution (WMS), you can create and manage warehouse transactions, such as receiving, put-away, picking, packing, and shipping. Paperless picking is also an option with prioritized picking queues and batch and wave picking.
• Replenishment—Acumatica supports lead times, safety stock, economic ordering quantities, moving average forecasts, min/max, reorder points, seasonality, and more.
• Warehouse Transfers—To see how planned transfer orders affect supply at each warehouse, Acumatica creates replenishment profiles between warehouses.
Other supply applications
Acumatica’s supply applications are not limited to the above. The software also includes the ability to support:
• Manufacturing—Acumatica provides make-to-stock, batch manufacturing, make-to-order, and project-centric manufacturers with linked applications for production planning, estimating, scheduling, engineering, material planning, and product configuration.
• Returns—Customer returns are sorted and placed in vendor inventory for future order fulfilment or item disposal.
• Advanced AP/PO Automation—SourceDay is a popular app for vendor management and procurement. Acumatica’s large market has tools like SourceDay for sophisticated supply chain and supplier management.
• Embedded CRM—Acumatica’s native CRM application enables you to track vendors in one unified view and keep track of their communications and information via support cases for problem management.
• Quality Management—The Certified eWorkplace Apps quality module helps businesses minimize returns and improve client happiness by providing a framework for testing and reporting.
• Electronic Data Interchange—With Acumatica, you may speed up vendor purchase orders with verified EDI apps and get confirmed advance ship notifications.
Bottom line
These are some of the ways that Acumatica’s supply applications and strategies can help mitigate supply chain disruptions. Having a good handle on your inventory can avoid stock-outs and other issues that can arise when disruptions occur. In addition, Acumatica’s functionality can help with managing vendor relationships and automating the procurement process. With these features working together, you can be confident that your supply chain is running smoothly and efficiently.
Download this playbook to learn how supply chain disruptions can be overcome with Acumatica, a scalable and affordable cloud platform designed for growing businesses.