Just curious what other companies do when they source a part from multiple different suppliers where each have their own price, lead time, etc… and how you go about actively managing a split of business volume and maintaining some target split between suppliers. I highly doubt my company is the only one who is multi-sourcing components in an ever evolving supply chain landscape. This is a necessary mitigation strategy for supply chain risks.
My largest frustration with Epicor is not being able to actively manage multi-sourcing policies and receiving PO suggestions for multiple suppliers that respect a targeted % split and take into account the difference in lead times to make PO suggestions. I am often referred to the Purchase Contracts module, but after spending a lot of time considering this since it does allow you to create a contract across suppliers for a part I am not convinced this is the best streamlined solution to accomplish multi-sourced policies. The Purchase Contracts module seems like a very round-about way to accomplish multi-sourcing and doesn’t lend itself to nicely managing a large portfolio of multi-sourced parts, but I don’t think there is any other solution in Epicor that gives the buyer PO suggestions across more than one supplier. (The one exception might be urgent planning but that doesn’t follow a targeted % split of business for the part)…
Who else does multi-sourcing and what do you do in Epicor to manage this??
** Not to be biased, but I do like how other ERP’s have addressed this such as Microsoft Dynamics, but I just don’t see how Epicor handles this, nor do they plan on having this functionality in the future**