Purchase Order creation is without a doubt a fundamental part of any inventory based business.
Without raw materials to manufacture and/or without goods to sell, well, what are we doing here exactly?
So now that we have relatively easily established PO’s are an important function… let’s get into why it’s a challenge in most businesses.
The Goal
Ensure with one click of a button that any staff member can view easily digestible Availability and Sales History data, so that they can easily make a purchasing decision, and then with one more click of a button create multiple PO’s correctly and efficiently.
The Challenge
1) There is a significant amount of data and guesswork analysis and guesswork experience required in deciding when and how much to order.
2) Both the decision and the process is often dependent on 1-2 key people in the business. Whilst the decision on what to buy should be a single responsibility of a purchaser, the ability to create purchase orders should not be a specialised task and/or a single point of failure if someone goes on holiday or decides to join the ‘Great Resignation’ sooner rather than later
3) Mistakes when creating PO’s cost big. Mistyping in a SKU or amount is difficult to check with a highly manual approach and easily made.
4) Most businesses have LOADS of SKU’s. Some of our clients are upwards of 10k SKU’s. Manually typing that in or messing around with CSV uploads is not efficient and again incredibly error prone
The Solution
The solution is essentially an ExcelAddIn – in a quick summary an ExcelAddIn is;
an application that runs inside an Excel Ribbon
still maintains the flexibility and ability for human eyeballing during an automated process
it is not Functions or Macros, but the same way Microsoft codes the rest of Excel
It allows developers to pull in data from external sources like API’s and databases
read and write data to any Excel sheet
repeatably and robustly code any domain or business logic into Windows Forms style controls
send data to other systems via API’s or direct to databases
allows auditing of operations and data manipulation
Phew, now that we understand that it’s a robust application layer that sits inside Excel let’s get on with explaining how an Excel AddIn built for DEAR PO Automation can work. Please remember this is all fully bespoke and therefore customisable!
Pre-requisite;
Your dataSights DataLake has your latest DEAR data synced and the SQL Views are setup by your trusty dataSights team to do the heavy Sales Info lifting
Step 1. Select filters to download availability and sales history data
Step 2. Click ‘Download’ button just once to download availability and sales history data
Step 3. Analyse data and make purchasing decisions
Step 4. Type Qty to put in PO in Order column
Step 5. Click ‘Create PO’ to create PO in DEAR
Step 6. Use your spare time to do some online shopping and (if in the office) when someone walks past your desk; hit Alt-Tab on Windows or CMD Tab on Mac to switch programs efficiently and effectively
The Results Testimonial
The PO ExcelAddIN that dataSights has created for us allows us to easily see which products need reordering by supplier. It not only provides stock level information but also reordering amounts and sales analysis data. This enables us to make better business decisions around our stock management and also saves us a lot of time as the plugin also creates a purchase order in Dear with a click of a button in excel!
Matthew Crick
Business Manager,Mercury Distribution
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Frequently asked questions
Create an account (Free trial available), create or bring an existing database, connect on the Connectors page, then Sync! Then follow a short video on how to use your database credentials to connect to Power BI in Direct query mode. Done!
Create an account (Free trial available), create or bring an existing database, connect DEAR on the Connectors page, then Sync! Then follow a short video on how to use your database credentials to connect to Excel. Done!
How can I push my DEAR data to Google Sheets
Create an account (Free trial available), create or bring an existing database, connect Xero on the Connectors page, then Sync! Then follow a short video on how to push your data to Google Sheets. Done!
Is my DEAR reporting data secure?
Absolutely. Every customer gets their very own isolated data warehouse. Database credentials are salt-encrypted. Multi-factor authentication can be activated for your account. We take security very seriously.
How often are my DEAR reports updated?
Your DEAR reports can be updated daily, on-demand, and if it’s DEAR sales data as frequently as every 5 minutes.
Can you push my DEAR data to our other systems like a 3PL or SAP?
Absolutely. We are software developers first, report developers second. Any DEAR data you need aggregated, calculated and pushed either via an ExcelAddIn or fully automated is no problem at all. Just get in touch and we can explore your requirements and offer multiple solution options.
Do you have any template DEAR Power BI reports
We do! The DEAR templates will need some customisation, which either we can do, or you can do. Just get in touch and we can figure out how best to progress!
Can you update DEAR using dataSights?
Absolutely. We are software developers first, report developers second. Any data you need pushed into DEAR either via an ExcelAddIn or fully automated is no problem at all. Just get in touch and we can explore your requirements and offer multiple solution options.
Can we choose whether we build our own DEAR reports or have dataSights build them for us?
The choice is yours, or you can choose a combination, or we can coach you. Our only goal is to automate all our data, and guide you to 100% automated DEAR report automation.
Can we consolidate multiple DEAR ?
We can consolidate multiple DEAR’s, Shopify’s, Hubspots, whatever systems you use, we can consolidate into a single Xero Sales table for example. Get in touch, and we would love to show you how OR start a FREE Trial and connect multiple Xero, and sync away!