March 15, 2022
A large number of manufacturers are facing supply chain shortages these days. This is the reality of current business. Analytics are calling 3 major reasons for supply chain management issues: COVID creating a shortage of workers, distortions to a customer demand due to changes in the purchasing behavior, and the fact that manufacturing systems are run at or near their maximum possible capacity. This has led to difficulties in meeting customer demands and a shortfall in inventory. Running close to capacity makes the production process very fragile but that means that companies are continuously looking for the best way to organize a purchasing process to solve their supply management challenges.
Supply Chain and PO Complexity
The problems with supply chain management processes are hitting all companies – very small prototyping and engineering as well as very large enterprises. We’ve been hearing about the problems with many OpenBOM customers and prospects. The problem in a nutshell- companies are attempting to buy components from multiple suppliers for any price. The challenge for the vast majority of them is to adjust the production planning system to work in such a way. In the good old days, PO was typically received in full. Not anymore – companies are trying to buy inventory from multiple places to de-risk their production plan.
In this blog post, we’ll be taking a sneak peek at partial PO receive as a solution that can help you manage the production planning and purchasing process while experiencing shortages in deliveries.
Partial PO (Purchase Order)
The solution we are bringing to our customers was inspired by many customer requests and allows a customer to perform a partial receive of a PO and automatical generation of a separate PO to handle the rest of the process. In such a way, you can continuously receive components against an existing PO without the need of creating a new one. OpenBOM PO receive function will do it for you.
Such a supply chain strategy will allow you to automate the process of PO receive and not worry about ordering from multiple places. In a crisis time like today, companies are not concerned about lead time and running multiple orders. A new “partial PO” process can bring a way to manage it in a more reliable form.
Video Demo
In this video, you can see an early preview of the Partial PO receive process in OpenBOM. It allows you to receive multiple POs at the same time, calculate the difference between quantity received and original PO quantity and create a new PO for the missing quantity.
Conclusion
OpenBOM provides a simple, flexible, and powerful mechanism to manage purchasing process starting from initial design and bringing the data from the engineering system to inventory management and integrated support for POs and RFQs. A partial PO receive is a long-awaited request from many customers that are looking at how to optimize PO management and handle a fragmented PO receive during this turbulent time. The function will be available in all paid OpenBOM subscriptions.
Best, Oleg
