Suggestion segregation by buyer

Epicor ERP 10
1

Good morning, folks!

We are challenged summarizing change suggestions in a meaningful way. The setup we use sets a default buyer for new buy suggestions, but for items that already have an existing PO, the suggestions are segregated by buyer, as our buyers place their names on the PO’s as they are created.

I am trying to create an attack list for change suggestions on existing PO’s, currently they are all segregated depending upon what buyer created the PO.

New suggestions are easy, since they all use a default buyer. (We don’t have buyers established on our purchased parts).

Any ideas?

2

I’ll admit, after reading your post, I’m not exactly sure what you’re looking for. But I do want to offer a warning.

You may not want a report/summary that simply looks at CHANGE Suggestions. They often play hand-in-hand with NEW Suggestions. They really shouldn’t be reviewed separately.

Below is an example I wrote up for our Buyers a while ago.

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In this example, we had (2) jobs requiring Qty (2) of a part.

Job A requirement is due on 4/24/2024.
Job B requirement is due on 10/31/2024.

We had an open PO for qty (4) due 12/19/2023.

Our buyer was confused why he was getting a NEW suggestion when we already had enough on order. The problem was, he wasn’t looking at the CHANGE suggestions. (He had turned them off in time phase)

In this case, MRP actually created both Change and New suggestions to optimize this situation. Yes, we had enough on order to cover demand. BUT, we only needed qty (2) on order right now for the first order. So MRP suggested reducing the existing PO to a qty of (2) (and another suggestion to postpone it based on the lead times in our system)… and then created a NEW suggestion to buy the other (2) closer to when they were actually needed for the second Job.

There are a TON of factors that play into suggestion calculations. But, in the case above, if you only looked at the NEW suggestion (like our Buyer did), you’d wonder why MRP was saying you should buy (2) when you already have enough on order to fill all demand. You’re not accounting for the CHANGE suggestion which says to reduce the initial order.

If you’re only looking at the CHANGE Suggestions, you’d be at a loss why MRP was saying you should reduce the order to a qty of (2) when your demand says you need (4).

NEW and CHANGE suggestions work together, in sequence.

Again, I’m not sure what your goal is… but I warn against evaluating the suggestions separately. You’ll only see half of the equation.

2 Likes
3

Post processing on the method that loads the changes you can lookup the existing PO and assign the buyer. for new suggestions it is POSugg.GetRowsPlant, but we don’t allow change suggestions, so I don’t know what method is called.

4

Well aware of this. A brief explanation -
We already see all the suggestions that are for parts that have BUY suggestions (all to default buyer) because when we see a BUY suggestion, we look at the full demand in Time Phase.

What we want to see are items that just have CHANGE suggestions, but do not have BUY suggestions, since those have to be queried individually by buyer. These are typically items that will be delinquent due to schedule changes, even though their quantities are correct. I want to see those, then I can parse them into an actionable report.

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5

Oh, I gotcha now. Was confused by your use of “default buyer”. … cause you can set the default buyer on a part/part class. I missed that you created a “default buyer” for all new suggestions to go to. My bad. Miss read. I’m with you now!

6

It looks like SugPOChg has what you want and the buyer it already there. If you exclude the cancels which would be matched to a new that should get what you want.

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7

I can’t access the data in the manner you have shown. I can only work inside the Epicor system.

Currently I grab all the default buyer (no buyer) suggestions from New PO Suggestions. I then assemble that into an actionable report.

I may try just doing that for the active PO’s (with buyers) and assemble all of that data.

The buyers struggle with Buyers Workbench, they are overwhelmed with the amount of suggestions, primarily because we forecast our demand well into the future due to the nature of our products (very long lead time raw material with no flexibility for schedule slippage)

8

You will see the same information in the data dictionary. I do processing in getrowsplant to color code and comment the workbench for our buyers so they know which items are good to process as is and which need research

9

I do not have access to “data dictionary”.

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