Synopsis:
- Which reports can help me decide what my alert levels should be?
- How do I configure alert levels for my products from the AdvancePro Software?
- How do I import alert levels from an excel sheet?
Webinar transcript
APT University: Creating Reorder Levels
Preset: intro slide, export schema
Hi everyone and Welcome to AdvancePro University – Today we’re going to be focusing on Reorder Alert levels – specifically we’re going to look at:
(slide 2)
What is a reorder Alert Level? What is the Target level?
Where in AdvancePro can I find my reorder alerts?
How to create Reorder points manually in the software
How to import reorder points from an excel spreadsheet.
A method to understand what your reorder points to be.
(slide 3)
1.
So a Reorder Alert Level is the amount below which AdvancePro will recommend that you order more product – and that refers to available stock, so if a product is sold but not yet shipped, or committed to a manufacturing work order, it won’t count as available stock.
A target level is the amount AdvancePro will recommend that you order enough to reach,
So the amount AdvancPro will recommend you order is equal to Target level minus current stock. And then if the product is purchased using a unit breakdown it divides that out.
I should also mention that you can set different reorder points for each product in eachwarehouse.
2,
Now in AdvancePro there’s two ways to find out what you’re low on, and what you should order,
The first is under Products – Reorder level alert report – and this will show everything you’re low on based on your settings. The other way is to just start a vendor order, and if there’s any product you’re low on you can run a search, and filter to below reorder points. Check off the item to add it to the order, at which point you can change the quantity if you need to round it off.
Now note that you won’t see this filter if you have the show combined variant setting enabled under your site settings in Admin.
3.
To Create Reorder levels in the software, Just go to view all products and choose the product you would like to edit – now click the E button next to the product on the right hand edge, now click the additional info tab, and click update where it says reorder levels, here you can put in your alert level and target.
4.
Now if you want to make changes across the board, you can also import these values using a product import from an excel spreadsheet- and you can get a clean sheet ready to change and re-import using our export feature. We’ve covered this in detail in our previous videos, but we can just go to Admin > Utilities > Excel Import/Export and run an Export. You create a schema or Preset – So I’m going to create one that is just the SKU, name, the reorder alert level and the target level.
So now we choose where we want to save the file and export – and in just a few moments we have a sheet we can change and modify. We can also run formulas here – check our Advanced Excel Tricks Video for details on that. But I’d like to recommend some formulas at this point.
(Back to Powerpoint, slide 4)
5.
So here is a sample reorder level formula. Essentially this one says I only want to place an order once every 3 months.
So for the alert level – we want to get the sales per day, and multiply by the lead time. Or if the lead time is a month, for example, we want the sales per month for that product. And it is a good idea to add a safety buffer of 5 or 10 percent – because you ideally want your business to be able to handle a little growth.
Now for the Target – you want to get your sales over 3 months in this case – or however often you want to be ordering on average. And again add a small buffer.
So where can you get this information in AdvancePro?
Navigate to reports, then go to General reports and look at the Advance Net Movement report
Now this is a report that shows everything that came in and went out over a given period. So you can list it for last month or last quarter, and if you’ve been using AdvancePro for a while, you could even look at this time last year for seasonal products.
Now here we’ll get an amount shipped column, and the great thing is here this can be exported to excel and sorted by SKU – just like your product export, so you can easily put together your formulas and bring data over to quickly get a set of alert levels and target levels for your product.
This concludes Today’s session of AdvancePro Tech.