The Place Orders screen has a wide variety of display options to help you choose how you want your orders to be calculated and displayed.
Order Line Filtering
Order Line Display Mode
This allows you to control what items are displayed for ordering:
- All: All items that match your filters are shown, whether or not they need ordering
- Needs To Be Ordered: Only items that need to be ordered are shown. Note that if a supplier has zero items that need to be ordered, that supplier will not be shown in the Supplier Order Summaries list.
- Only In Additional Items List: Only items in the list you specify will be shown.
Show All Sites for any items that need to be ordered
When this option is enabled, if you need to order an item for 1 of your sites, then the item is shown from all sites that can also receive supply from the vendor you have selected. So if PART_A at Warehouse ABC needs to be ordered, then you would also see PART_A shown for warehouse DEF and XYZ in Step 2.
Those additional lines will appear with zero order quantity, since they didn't need to be ordered, but having them pre-populated in your order can help if you're trying to balance an order across multiple sites.
Create Individual Releases
This option works hand-in-hand with the days coverage and order cycles. Rather than making single orders for larger quantities, the original cadence of ordering from the order schedule is preserved, and you will see multiple releases with different receipt dates. This can be useful if you wish to have multiple releases that can act like a blanket PO.
Coverage Parameters
The coverage parameters allow you to virtually "reach out" into the future and bring in extra inventory when you want to.
Coverage Mode
This defines what is the nature of the "Cover me Until" and "Days of Coverage" boxes. Normally it is based on a release date, in that you are asking StockIQ to cover you for releases up to a certain date.
You can change this to "Ship Date", and StockIQ will look to cover you for any shipments on or up to that date. You can enter a ship date that would even result in a release date in the past. As well, when you use coverage for a certain ship date, that ship date is plugged in as the expected ship date for any lines found in your order, on the assumption that you've been given a specific ship date from your supplier.
Cover Me Until & Days of Coverage
These are the days, and corresponding number of days of coverage for your extra coverage. You can modify either one of these fields.
IMPORTANT: If you are using Order Cycles, then your coverage date / days of coverage parameter does not make any change to your suggested orders until the days of coverage you type in is longer than whatever your order cycle is.
For example, if you have a 7-day order cycle, typing in coverage days of 0-7 will make no difference in planning. Only once your coverage days entered is 8 or larger will you see any difference.
Extend Coverage to next Order/Ship/Delivery Date
When you are using Vendor Schedules to set specific order, shipment, or delivery dates, StockIQ will only suggest orders on the exact days that correspond with needing to make a release for that order, shipment, or delivery day.
IMPORTANT: Note that this means that on all other days, you will see no suggestions for that supplier/site combo, unless you check this checkbox!
If you check this checkbox, then StockIQ will put in an automatic days coverage to get you to whatever your next release day would be, so that you can see what your releases will look like ahead of your actual ordering day.
This can be useful if you want to place some orders ahead of time. This is especially useful if you have a long interval between orders, such as once a month, and you want to create a few orders as the month goes on, or do later "fill-in" orders, rather than having only one shot at it on one single day of the month.
Network Search Options
Search For Alternate Vendors
This specifies if StockIQ should look for alternate suppliers on items where you are projected to be out of stock. If we find a supplier with a shorter lead time, we will present it in the Substitutes tab. Normally you would leave this checked.
Perform Transfer/Alternate Checks
This specifies if StockIQ will check for source warehouse transfer quantity availability when you're doing transfers, and also if we look for site, alternate, and replacement substitutes to offer you in the Substitutes tab. Normally you will leave this checked.
Pre-Run Options
Substitutes Search On:
Performance option that allows you to skip searching for substitutes entirely, only on items that are suggested for order, or on ALL matching items returned.
Substitute Lines Filter:
This filter allows you to filter what lines are/are not shown as suggestions based on if they have substitutes or not:
- Show All - Show all lines, regardless of substitute being present or not.
- Show Only With Substitutes - show lines only with substitutes found of any time.
- Show Only Without substitutes - show only lines with no substitutes present.
- Show Only with Recommended Substitutes - show only lines that have a substitute which SIQ has evaluated as being worth taking.
- Show Only without Recommended Substitutes - show only lines that do not have a recommended substitute.
Pre-Run Allocation Wizard
Allows you to pre-run the allocation wizard if desired when doing transfers. You will also have to configure the allocation wizard parameters, and when this box is checked, a button to configure those appears.
Pre-Running the allocation wizard means that StockIQ's unconstrained transfer plan will be run through the allocation wizard before being shown to you in the app, so that you will immediately have an actionable transfer order.
Pre-Run Supplier Minimum Targeting
This option allows you to have StockIQ pre-run targeting for any supplier minimums you may have, so that when you see the order, it has already been adjusted upwards to meet any supplier mins that you may have.
When enabled, you will have to set the "Pre-Targeting" options, and a button appears so that you can do this when enabled.
This option we generally don't recommend, as it can cause non-intuitive results with large order quantities.
Pre-Run Supplier-Item Minimum Targeting
This allows you to pre-run supplier-item minimum adjustments, if you have any. This is not common.
As with pre-running the Supplier Mininum targeting, you must set the pre-targeting parameters before this can be used.
Order Line Suppression
Multi-Supplier Item Conflicts
If you have selected multiple suppliers, such as in a scenario where you wish to place an order for consolidation, or you have different sub-categories or ship-points from a supplier, it is possible that the same item-site may be matched from two different suppliers. In this case, you must inform StockIQ what to do:
- Lowest Supplier Level: Choose the item with the lowest (numerically) supplier level, e.g. closest to primary.
- Shortest Lead Time: Item-Site-Supplier with the shortest lead time is kept.
- Lowest Cost: Item-Site-Supplier with the lowest cost is kept.
- All: All matches are included (this can lead to an inadvertent double-order, so be cautious)
Hide lines with suspended Launch Order Alert
Pretty much what it sounds like - any lines with a suspended "Launch Order" alert are suppressed.
Order Schedule & Sawtooth Display
These options control how the "Schedule" and "Sawtooth" tabs are displayed in step 2 - the Daily/Weekly/Monthly interval, and whether or not to show history on the Sawtooth.
Load Balancing Filter
If you are using supplier load balancing, the load balancing filter options control which parts are returned to you, and what quantities are shown on them:
- Applied - Load balancing is applied. All suppliers for a given item-site that are involved in a load balancing distribution will be shown, even if the primary filter is in place, and that supplier is not marked as primary. Order Quantities recommended are the load-balanced quantities.
- Disabled - Load Balancing is not applied. Normal filtering rules apply, and order quantities shown are the order quantities recommended before any load balancing was applied, as though there was no load balancing configured
- With Load Balancing Only - Only item-sites involved in load-balancing measures are shown. The same filter and quantity rules apply as in the "Applied" option.
- Without Load Balancing Only - Only item-sites NOT involved in load-balancing measures are shown, e.g. items that have a traditional primary/secondary/etc. supply setup.