More updates to the Netstock app: Waiting for existing orders to arrive before ordering more
Waiting for existing orders to arrive before ordering more
Imagine you have more than enough stock on order, but it isn’t scheduled to arrive within the normal lead time. This could be due to temporary supplier delays or perhaps because you place blanket orders for delivery months in advance.
In situations like this, the app might recommend that you place another order to fill a temporary gap. But this could be undesirable because the supplier won’t actually be able to deliver any sooner than your existing orders.
That’s why we introduced a new setting to allow you to specify the “grace period” for which you’re willing to wait for existing orders to arrive before ordering more.
Here’s an example showing how it works:
The purple line represents a large existing order coming in after the normal lead time indicated by the dotted green line. The app has taken the existing order into account and the expected recommendation to receive new stock after the lead time is not present.
Longer grace periods can lead to potentially longer periods of low stock or no stock, so take care with this setting.
Note that this behavior only applies to the orders you raise if you have the Projected Orders (“Look Forward”) feature enabled.
Background improvements
We make updates to the app on a regular basis to improve reliability and performance. Here are some of those changes.
During June, we squashed 9 (mostly cosmetic) bugs and made a number of other improvements. Here’s a small selection of those:
- Added validation to the configuration settings to prevent blank or invalid values from being saved accidentally
- Improved the response time when filtering by group fields on the forecasting page and projection module
- Added a transfer download option for users of Microsoft Great Plains
- Fixed an issue which caused the stock projection module CSV file to be blank if the filtered location/s included a ‘#’ character
- Fixed an issue with the BOM table of the stock enquiry page where the total row didn’t show if the scrollbar was needed
Coming soon
We’re putting the finishing touches on a new multi-item forecast adjustment page, part of the growing feature set of the Advanced Forecasting Module. Here’s a sneak peek:
