Major Improvements & Features
Service Level by ABC/XYZ & Price Tier
A big new feature in this release is the ability to further tailor your order policies AND service level targets -- and therefore your safety stock levels -- not just by ABC class, but also by XYZ class. We are very excited about this new flexibility!
Additionally, we've added the ability to configure your matrix by Price Tier (more below), so that you can have extremely fine-grained control over your service level targets and ordering across all types of parts - high volume, low volume, recurring, sporadic, expensive, or cheap.
We highly recommend taking advantage of this new matrix instead of using hard-coded rules from the ERP and/or your integration, since it can really help optimize your inventory levels, particularly for sporadic and slow moving or dead items.
You will see updates to the StockIQ Order Policy Matrix, Class Settings, Global Order Policy Settings, and Global Class Settings screens to accommodate these sweeping new changes.
We look forward to helping you configure your matrix to take advantage of these extensive new features.
Place Blankets
New in this version is a screen to create Blanket Purchase Orders directly from within StockIQ. This screen looks very similar to the Place Orders screen, using a similar wizard-like interface. The Place Blankets screen will make Blanket PO recommendations based on your filters and days coverage options, allows you to view the order schedule, sawtooth, supplier mins and more, and then lets you place new blanket PO's directly into your ERP. These blanket PO's will appear in the Blanket Purchase Orders screen as well.
You can then use the Place Orders screen to issue releases against these blankets, which are automatically linked when the order is written.
Price Tier Awareness
As part of enhancing the new ABC/XYZ matrix for order policies and service levels, we've added the ability to configure price tiers for your products, so that you can differentiate your ordering and stocking behavior for expensive items vs inexpensive ones. For example, you might want to set a much higher service level target and ordering behavior (Order Point, 99% service level) for inexpensive items, but be more cautious about very expensive ones (Lot for Lot, 95%). You can configure up to 5 Price Tiers
Brand new Inventory Balancing (aka Suggested Transfers) Screen
The Inventory Balancing screen, aka Suggested Transfers, is all new for this version. It now follows the same wizard-style interface to move through inventory balancing recommendations, which you can now place directly from this screen. Use this screen to move excess from place-to-place, to sweep back to a hub, with various options for how much inventory to move from and to based on filters.
Unusual Sales Screen
New in this version of StockIQ is a dedicated Unusual Sales screen for helping you immediately identify unusual sales and create events for them if necessary. Various options exist for how to detect what is unusual for the item, item-site, item-customer and so on. This can make it very fast to create necessary events to help your forecast accuracy.
Stratification Detail Customer Info
Going through your product catalog to remove low-performing items is important. To assist with the SKU rationalization process, we have added customer details to the Stratification Detail Screen. In addition to new customer columns, customer detail and a forecast chart has been added to assist with this.
New Node selector popup
When using the forecast wizard, or setting seasonality of an item to another particular hierarchy level, we've improved the selector popup to make it faster and easier to use:
Now you can select from any of the options you're used to in the forecast manager:
Supplier Locations
A new Supplier Location data feed allows you to send information about different locations for your suppliers. This might be different factories for your vendors, or different physical locations of your warehouses. In either case, the location can be used to sort and filter your order lines, and StockIQ can even assign purchase order numbers based on different supplier locations, allowing you to group PO's or Transfers where you want to.
Supplier On-Hand Planning
StockIQ now includes an option to modify planning based on supplier on-hand information, if available. If supplier-on-hand is sufficient to satisfy a purchase requirement, manufacturing lead time can be skipped for that release, since inventory is available to ship immediately. This can be enabled or disabled in the Global Replenishment Settings
MOQ Ratio and Price Tier order awareness
Default and Supplier setting overrides now allow you to configure settings for some smart behavior as it relates to MOQ Ratio, so that StockIQ can be intelligent about knowing when to suggest an order, or when to skip it, even if it might seem to be needed. Learn more in the Supplier Settings Overrides screen.
Minor Improvements
- New Supplier Totals tab for multi-vendor ordering in Place Orders
- Brand new / updated Turns Detail screen
- Add "By ABC" to Turns screen
- Safety Stock Lead Time calculations account for delays due to vendor order/shipment/delivery schedules
- Added "Zero Releases" checkbox to lock schedules dialog box to zero out any releases planned inside the lock date at the time of lock.
- Sporadic Item Calculation Improvements - We have made some improvements to the sporadic item detection as part of seeking to improve planning on sporadic and slow moving items.
- We now recommend enabling sporadic safety stock for sporadic items in your Default Statistical Safety Stock settings.
- We also recommend some new values in your Global Inventory Limits settings for your sporadic items:
- Months Back: 12
- Weighted Average Demand Interval Alpha: 0.25
- Min Weighted Avg Interval: 0.75
- Min Overall Demand Interval: 0.75
- Min Percent Periods w/o Demand: 30%
- Recalculating stockouts can be done as net-change/partial to improve refresh speed
- Automated cleanup of old Items, Sites, ItemSites, etc. after 6 months activity
- Data quality notifications sent to support team when StockIQ detects problems with the data files
- Add Select All / Deselect All buttons for batch edit changes confirmation popup
- Add upload template for item-level pricebreaks (aka Matrix Pricing)
- Add Supplier Level, Inventory Position, Order Policy as a columns in Substitutes tab
- Inactive XX screens now allow you to select items to delete vs all
- Add pivot-grid view for on-hand-detail screen when in weekly resolution
- Click on series in pie charts to hide those series (e.g. in home screen)
- Add supplier country to supplier calendar grid so can clone calendars by country
- Add columns for notes in horizontal and vertical format forecast imports
- Add Purchase Cost to supplier info in Forecast Manager
- Options to assign purchase order numbers by "Is Expedited" or Supplier Location
- Add option in Global Structure Settings to allow auto-created hub/spoke and manufacturing default supplier item-site-supplier entries to be non-primary.
- Add Purchase UoM columns to Firm and Planned screen
- Auto-Generate a system "Unknown Supplier" for all items with no supplier so disco or obsolete items with no supplier can still calculate their depletion.
- Show all suppliers with load balancing in firm-and-planned screen when load-balancing plans are being shown (not just primary)
- Offer to remove all suggested releases within firm fence when saving supplier setting overrides
- Add Period-To-Date Percent of forecast to Place Orders Supply Order Line Grid
- Add options to Blanket Purchase Orders screen to suppress orders and lines that are fully consumed
- Increase precision of cubes in app displays
- Add original order value to sales order detail
- Add "By ABC" to On Hand Detail screen.