Simple Stock Ordering

What is Simple Stock Ordering?

Simple Stock Ordering is an add-on for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central that aims to simplify the process of reordering stock and keeping stock levels at the required level to prevent stockouts.

It puts all of the current stock and historical demand information in one place, allowing purchasers to make an informed judgement as to what needs to be ordered and when.

Why is this Needed?

Within the standard Dynamics 365 Business Central system, there is a lot of setup that needs to be done to set your reorder policies for each product.

Examples of these include:

• Lot-for-lot reordering
• Fixed reorder quantities
• Minimum and maximum reorder quantities
• Reorder points
• Safety stock lead times
• Reorder cycles

All of these must be set on a per-item and per-location basis, which can mean literally thousands of pieces of data that need to be entered into the system.

The aim of Simple Stock Ordering by Synergy Technology is to make it simple for people to do reordering, by giving them all of the information they need on current stock levels and historical demand, all in one place, so they can make informed decisions based on this information.

How does it work?

Simple Stock Ordering users a custom interface to display a variety of stock information all in one place. This interface tells users how many items are in stock, and also what’s in demand, including the quantities on:

• Purchase Orders
• Requisition Worksheets
• Inbound Transfers
• Assembly Orders
• Exclude bins

It also gives the user a view of how many have been sold over previous months, as well as what the average sales per period have been.

Based on the amount in stock, the amount in demand, and the amount that have been sold in previous months, the system will work out how many weeks cover we have. In this case, cover means how many weeks it would take to sell all the stock we have, based on our typical sales levels over the previous months.

The user can set a target level of weeks cover stock for that item, and the system will then compare this to the level of weeks cover for that item and recommend the amount that needs to be ordered.

The target number of weeks cover can be set system-wide, or individually per stock item.

The system will even round up this figure to consider available pack sizes (e.g. if a product can only be ordered in packs of 5, 10, 20 etc.) and round up to the nearest full pack quantity.

Based on all the information they have available, the purchaser can either accept the advised amount, or change it if they judge that the advised amount is incorrect for whatever reason.

When the user is happy with the quantities to be purchased, the lines that have a positive quantity are transferred to a specified requisition worksheet. When the lines have been added to this sheet, standard Business Central functionality is then used to create purchase orders from this screen.