Supply orders

Review the orders Flowlity recommends, adjust them, validate them, and send them to your suppliers or your ERP.

Supply orders is where you turn Flowlity's recommendations into real orders: you review them, adjust quantities and dates, validate them, and send them to your suppliers or your ERP. Changes you make to planned orders in Planning show up here too.

Where to find it: in the sidebar, go to Inventory & supply > Supply orders.

The tabs follow the life of an order:

• Planned: orders recommended by Flowlity, or created by hand, not validated yet. Flowlity recomputes them every night.

• Validated: orders you validated. Flowlity no longer changes them when it recomputes the plan.

• Released: firm purchase orders coming from your ERP. They are read-only in Flowlity.

• Delivered: orders that have been received.

How to review the orders to place this week

1

Open the planned orders

In Supply orders, open the Planned tab. Use the switch at the top right to work on Orders (one row per supplier and delivery date) or Order lines (one row per product).

2

Filter on the placement deadline

Click Date range, choose Placement deadline, then a preset such as Today, This week or In 2 weeks. Choose Delivery date instead to see what arrives in a given period. Past year looks back over the last year, for example to find missed deadlines.

3

Narrow down the list

Filter by Sites, Suppliers, Tags or Components. To focus on a set of products, paste their references in the Search by name or paste references box.

How to find the lines that need attention

1

Filter on alerts

Click Alerts and choose the alerts to show, for example Above net requirement, Below net requirement, Stockout response, Out of stock, Product constraints issue, Supplier constraints issue, No unit price or Above reference price.

2

Read the alerts of a line

Hover the Alerts cell of a row to see every alert on it.

3

Open the product's plan

To understand a line, click Open planning on the row. Ctrl+click (Cmd+click on Mac) opens it in a new tab.

How to check an order against supplier constraints

1

Open the order

On the Orders view, click an order to open its order lines.

2

Read the order details

The Order details panel shows:

• Dates: the Order Placement Deadline, the Delivery date and the Est. Delivery Date.

• Supplier constraints: Full truck quantity, Supplier MOQ and Order frequency. A warning icon shows when the order does not respect one of them.

• Order Quantity: the Total quantity, the number of Products and the Order Price.

How to change quantities, prices and delivery dates

1

Edit the cells

In an order, or in the Order lines view, change the quantity, the Unit Price or the delivery date directly in the cells. The page shows Editing while you have unsaved changes.

2

Move several lines at once

Select the lines, click Change delivery date, and pick the new date.

3

Explain the change

Click Comment on a line and write why you changed it. Other planners see the comment.

4

Save

Click Save, or Discard changes.

How to validate orders

1

Select the orders or lines

On the Planned tab, tick the orders or order lines to validate. When you select order lines, the selection bar shows the Total value of the selection and its quantity in each unit.

2

Validate

Click Validate and confirm. Inside an order, select lines and click Validate Order Lines. When every line of an order is validated, the order is validated too.

3

Undo a validation if needed

On the Validated tab, select the orders and click Discard validation.

How to send validated orders

1

Select the validated orders

Open the Validated tab and tick the orders to send.

2

Export them

Depending on how your site is connected, click Export to SFTP or Export API. Orders stay in Validated after an SFTP export. The Exported to SFTP column shows which ones are already sent.

3

Or download a file

On Order lines, click Download, then Standard order export (the full file) or Displayed columns (only the columns you show), and choose XLSX, CSV or TSV.

Once your ERP sends the purchase order back to Flowlity, the order moves to Released.

How to add an order line

1

Create the line

Click Create Order line. If your site uses supply agreements, click Create, then Create Order line.

2

Fill in the line

Choose the product and the supplier, enter the quantity and the delivery date, add a comment if you want, and click Create. The line appears in Planned.

How to plan the finished goods of a component

1

Filter on the component

On Order lines, use the Components filter to pick the component.

2

Open all its finished goods

Expand the line, then click Open aggregated view to open the Planning of every finished good that uses this component. Ctrl+click opens it in a new tab.

Good to know

• Units: on Order lines, pick the unit in the header of the Qty (secondary unit) column. On Orders, hover a quantity to see it in every unit.

• Columns: you can add columns such as past demand over the last 12 months, firm orders over the next 12 months, or the order placement deadline.

• Net requirement before and after prioritization: these columns show which sites a central warehouse cannot fully serve. Ask your Customer Success Manager to activate warehouse-prioritized supply.

• Order type: with the emergency supplier option, the Order type column shows Standard or Emergency. Ask your Customer Success Manager to activate it.

• Supply agreements: when your site uses them, a third view, Supply agreements, has its own tabs: Planned, Validated, Firm and Activated.

• Supplier collaboration: when it is active, Send request sends planned orders to the supplier. See Supplier collaboration portal.

• Views: save your filters, columns and sorting as custom views, as in Planning. See Views and filtering.

Related

• Review and validate supply orders

• Supplier constraints and order management

• Planning

• Alerts

• Comments

• KPIs