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[Jennifer Codding]

?I have been asked by my purchasing team to solve a problem, and I want to know what some of the best practices are in this area.

We are on AX 2012 Feature Pack. 

Some background.  We have a report that shows a vendor and the on time delivery stats.   We have the following situation, and want to know what your best practices are to handle them.

 
1)  Our purchasing team creates a PO with an expected delivery date.  After the Vendor receives the PO, they communicate to us that they won’t be able to match the expected delivery date.  How do you update a value to reflect that conversation with the vendor, but not change the original expected delivery date?

2) Then, the other situation is they ship some of the goods, but not all of the goods.  How can you partially receive the items, but still accurately assess the on time delivery report for a vendor.

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Jennifer Codding
IT Business Analyst
CMC Group
Bowling Green OH
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[Chan Stevens]

#1 is fairly easy–there is a requested delivery date and a confirmed delivery date. Requested is what your company is asking for, confirmed is what the vendor has committed to. Until someone populates the confirmed date, MRP treats the request date as the delivery date. If someone populates the confirmed date, then that’s the one used by MRP. BTW, this is a good excuse to justify using supplier portal–let the vendors do the extra maintenance of updating the PO date :-).

The only time this gets a little slippery in terms of metrics is where the vendor either notifies you sometime ahead of the date or slips past due and you have to beat a new commitment out of them.? In that case, you’ve got to decide whether to let the rest of your company in on this new info by updating the commitment date at which point the vendor would be “on time”, or leave the date frozen so they’re scored as late, but then MRP and the rest of the company don’t know when it’s coming. It also gets messy when you’ve asked to reschedule and therefore the reason the original date wasn’t met is self-inflicted, not vendor’s fault. This is why many clients add a field called “measurement date” to the PO line with some business rule logic around who can update that and under what circumstances.

#2 is a little trickier, since normally on time metrics are based on PO lines and just look for complete lines then score the results of the line. That IS best practice, and what you’re asking for is not exactly best practice. Instead of starting the query/report on the PO line table looking for completed lines, you’d instead start on the receipt table, and your percentage would not be based on count of ontime lines over count of all lines but on something like count of ontime receipts over count of all receipts.

The reason this isn’t exactly best practice is you’re trying to award “partial credit” for getting some or all of it on time. I get that your team wants to be vendor advocates and not ding them if 98 percent was on time but a few stragglers showed up a couple days later, but there’s often a fair amount of cost for that additional receipt–extra handling, extra paperwork, sometimes a second invoice and remittance, etc., and it also incentivizes the vendor to ship partials and gives them an easy “out” for chronic lateness. Who would you rather do business with–a vendor that ships complete and on time 98% of the time and late 2%, or a vendor that always ships 98% of what you ask for on time but follows through with late partials every time?

BTW in terms of line versus order metrics, the date fields are stored at line level, so no need to worry about trying to measure lines with different dates against the overall PO header.
?

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Chan Stevens
Industry consultant
Cincom Systems
Cincinnati OH
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[Allen Rupp]

Chan is spot on.

#1 best practice is to use the confirmed delivery date.? I also believe the allowing any date to become past due is a bad practice for MRP. Therefore, I also agree with creating the field for a measurement date.

#2 I also agree with Chan. providing partial credit for partial deliveries isn’t keeping your business goals as the main priority.?

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Allen Rupp
Commercial Purchasing Manager
Woodland Foods
Waukegan IL
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