When a buyer quits

A buyer quit last week. I am asked to move all of his open purchase orders to the other buyers per a spreadsheet. I want a better way to do this.

  1. Current method - I have to assign myself as an authorized user of all of the buyers (I hate doing that), then with DMT, unapprove all 85 open POs, reassign buyer, reapprove POs, and maybe get someone to approve a level higher on some of them.

  2. Or, I could make the other buyers an authorized user of the one that quit. Certainly the simplest solution, but it takes away the idea of who actually owns the PO.

  3. I know you can assign buyers to part classes. Cool going forward, but what about existing open POs?

  4. What I’d like to do is:

  • Create a unique buyer for (almost) every part class like a HARNESS buyer ID and a STEEL buyer ID, etc.
  • Assign the same person (as in a “Person/Contact”) to multiple buyers so that their name actually shows up on the PO
  • Change that assigned person as needed when someone quits (fired, transferred, etc)
  • Right name still shows on PO (if reprinted)
  • No unapprove/reapprove needed

Problem is, I can’t do that. You can’t assign the same Person/Contact to multiple buyers.

What do you all do in this situation?

I guess I could make just as many “Person/Contacts” as buyers. Then change the name of the PerCon as needed.

I just now figured out how to edit the name after the fact (see pic).

I checked, and it does ripple through to the buyer and even the existing PO.

Hmm. That’s not horrible…

image

You could use DMT for the bulk of the work. Probably two loads.

  1. Unapprove POs being changed
  2. Set new buyer ID and mark approved

Still need to set l yourself as authorized user of all necessary buyers. I typically add system admins as authorized users to all buyer and workforce IDs as standard procedure. Makes system maintenance and troubleshooting a lot easier.

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Jason
I would go with #2 - it is the simplest and easiest. tell each of the remaining buyers which POs they need to take (the same spreadsheet you have) and have them edit the buyer once they access.
we’re talking 85 POs correct? it’s not like hundreds or thousands.
with 4 remaining buyers that’s 20.2 POs each they need to edit.

IMHO
PS: or get a college kid home for winter break, give them all buyer access, and pay them to complete the task in a morning. Tell them you’ll pay their UBER expense :slight_smile: if they don’t have a car

happy new year

I find the way epicor implemented “BUYERS” confusing. They really should be considered “Buyer groups”.

We’re a small company with lots of folks doing multiple jobs, so nearly every user that ever needs to make/edit PO’s is setup as. BUYER (which they are assigned as the default). Then all other “PO maintainers” are assigned as authorized users.

Had I known better, I’d have made a single buyer.

P.S. - we dont have limits or do PO approvals

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I agree with @ckrusen here. In really simple terms you only want to know who created the PO in the first place.

We ended up making all of our Imports Purchasing team members authorized users of each other. This allows them to “Take over others PO’s” if need be.

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Now that we’re multi-site, I might have made one buyer for each site. But probably would have ended up adding users from the other sites as well …

Thanks all.

I see that we see purchasing differently than how Epicor does, and even differently than how you all do.

There’s a big insistence on ownership here, so the notion of a buyer group, as @ckrusen called it (agreed), is counter to that.

But it’s a time when I could push for change. A few key managers left (one actually passed away), and I’m always up for doing things in a more standardized way than the way we used to do things when we had 1/5 the production that we do now (six years ago).

If we did go to one buyer “group” or if the groups were fluid (every purchasing employee was a member of all groups), then the PO suggestions screens would be kind of meaningless, no? Or you’d have to maybe add a UD field to the POHeader table and display it in the suggestions screens…?

We do have limits and approvals.

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You can make buyer groups based on part classes if buyers are responsible for different part classes.

Vinay Kamboj

Right, and that’s better than what we do now (part by part), and that’s probably our first step.

My only quibble is that the if I change the buyer group on a class the existing POs will not change. (Obviously–it’s kind of impossible since one PO could have parts from several classes.)

I have often recommended that the Buyer ID be a “role” rather than a person… so you could have a “Glass Buyer”, “Metal Buyer” “Supplies Buyer”…
in the “NAME” field on the buyer tab, you can put the real name of the person if you like, OR you could simply leave the name as “Glass Buyer”…
In the Authorized Users, you assign the actual people who are allowed to act in that role…
If you use the above scheme, when a buyer leaves, you simply need to go into the Buyer Maintenance, and change the approved user to the new buyer name.

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Tim,

That’s kind of the direction I was thinking. You might call them commodities.

Some scenarios I am working through in my head:

  1. If a person makes a PO by hand, I guess they have to pick which buyer group (i.e. commodity) and be right or else this isn’t future-proof at all.
  2. If the same vendor supplies different commodities (like raw steel AND fabricated parts), we need to either
    a. Use one PO per commodity, or
    b. Always ensure the same person is assigned to both commodities
  3. I am seeing how utilizing PO suggestions–like actually trusting them–would streamline this.Our problem is not having faith in them because there are just so many variables with MRP, etc. So our people look at the suggestions as guidelines and then make their own PO.

Typically an approved user has a Buyer entry as their default. So creating a PO manually would default to the buy that user selected as their default.

I find that it’s better to force people to pick the correct option every time (i.e. - no default), than to rely on them changing a default - when required.

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My view on “Trust”… you need to hire Buyers that you can trust (but verify)… any untrustworthy buyer WILL break the rules. it doesn’t matter what you do, how you set limits, etc… it is easy to break the system if you are an unreliable person. Any buyer could break the rules by simply overriding values… for example, if they have a “Max PO size” of $25k… they can always split up the PO to get around the rule… OR change the unit cost on the PO, OR make a side deal with the supplier.

  1. Hire trustworthy Buyers. (and if they are untrustworthy, it is time for them to move on!)
  2. tell them the rules that they are to follow
  3. verify that they dont break the rules.This is done with reports, AP Validation of POs, etc.
  4. Reward them for low variances and for high inventory turns, on-time deliveries (showing that they are not breaking the rules and buying too much).
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@ckrusen You know, I have wondered what “default buyer” was but never cared to investigate. Everything with buyers is 1:1 here (for now), so it was meaningless to me. So it’s the user’s default buyer, not the buyer’s default user–which makes no sense, but that’s what I thought.

@timshuwy Well said.

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We have a Buyer for each user, with the Buyer name the same as the users name. And then we add that user as an Approved User, and set the Default Buyer for them. Then we add all the other users that might need to maintain that user’s PO.

I guess the Buyer entry that has the “System Default:” selected(on the Detail tab), is the one that would be used for a PO, when a user does not have “Default Buyer” selected for any Buyers that they are an authorized user for.