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Advanced
Distribution
Click
Here for an Advanced Distribution PDF Factsheet.
(Adobe
Acrobat Required)
 Macola
ES's Advanced Distribution (ADIS) package helps your organization run more
efficiently and effectively by managing quality, product costs, customer returns
and materials.
Important advantages of
Advanced Distribution are:
- Landed cost capability
- Multi-bin tracked within
one warehouse
- Update quantity on
hand of an item when picked
- Return Material Authorization
(RMA)
- Purchase requisitions
and request for quote
Macola ES’s ADIS application
consists of a set of six specific functions: Landed Cost, Hard Allocation,
Multi-Bin, Confirm Pick and Return Material Authorization. This functionality,
described in detail below, provides added benefits and value to the way your
business manages its operations.
Landed
Cost
ADIS’ Landed Cost capability enables you to calculate all costs, in addition
to the cost of the product, normally associated with purchasing and receiving
materials in-house for resale or production. These costs, called landed costs,
include such items as freight, import duties, custom charges, and in-house
handling charges.
The Landed Cost Tracking
System ensures that landed costs are capitalized against the
 inventory
item, allowing for accurate ROI (Return on Investment) and COGS (Cost of Goods
Sold) analysis by location.
What happens if your company
receives invoices for landed costs prior to the receipt of the ordered merchandise?
Within the ADIS application, you have the ability to update the associated
landed costs to equal the actual landed costs. This adjustment ensures that
when you receive the item, Macola ES updates the inventory cost for the cost
of the item plus the actual landed cost. Conversely, if you receive the merchandise
before the invoices for the landed costs, Macola ES calculates the standard
landed costs and either adds them to the item cost or posts them to a General
Ledger (G/L) account during inventory receiving, depending on the selected
landed cost code.
The Landed Cost System
supports companies dealing with international vendors and others who require
comprehensive inventory costing inclusive of all landed costs.
Multi-bin
A Multi-Bin system
supports tightly controlled stockroom environments, as you can create and
maintain multiple bins within a location. Within ADIS, multiple items may
reside in the same bin and the same item may reside in multiple bins within
a location. You may also define the physical limitations of a bin’s space
by specifying a bin maximum based on quantity, weight, or volume.
Benefits of Multi-bin
include the following:
- Provides for easy location
of parts
- Effectively uses available
physical space, reducing storage costs and inventory carrying costs
- Minimizes labor cost
of locating inventory
Confirm
pick
The Confirm Picking function updates the quantities of on-hand and allocated
items by location. It adjusts the location quantities to reflect the quantities
that you picked to fill a specified order.
Some Confirm Pick features
include the following:
- Pick All automatically
assigns picking dates to all line items for the selected order at the selected
location
- Pick Certain does not
assign picking dates automatically, but proceeds to the line item screen
of the order where you may pick and unpick line items manually
Instead of reducing inventory
at the time of shipping or billing, Confirm Pick reduces inventory at the
time of picking. This adds flexibility to the way you do business. Macola
ES also enables inventory pick/ship staging through ledger suspense.
Return
Materials Authorization
Return Materials
Authorization gives your customer service and sales representatives the power
to track authorizations for return of products from customers and automatically
trigger reshipment or credit. RMA provides a means to enter, track and resolve
customer returns. You can then analyze your RMAs to look for trends in returns
for particular items or return reasons.
RMA helps improve customer
satisfaction by providing a centralized application for entry and resolution
of authorizations for material returns from the customer. This allows your
customer service representatives to enter RMAs immediately, when the customer
is still on the phone. RMA can help reduce returns by allowing you to track
which items are returned the most and for what reasons to allow identification
of possible quality problems.
Entry
of Return Materials Authorizations
One RMA is entered per phone call/customer. It can apply to multiple invoices
and orders. The customer service representative or salesperson taking the
call can then, on a line-by-line basis, indicate which items being returned
should be credited and which should be reshipped. The RMA can be linked to
an existing or historical customer order, or not linked at all, in the case
that the return is for an order that is no longer in history.
Reshipment
of items
The reshipment can be for the same item or another item - so a substitute
item of comparable value can be returned to the customer in exchange for the
incorrect or damaged item. The reshipment may occur before or after the items
being returned are received. Hence, depending on policy, the item being reshipped
may be shipped out immediately or held until the items being returned are
received. Regardless, the order for reshipment becomes a normal customer order
that may be processed in the same manner as other orders.
Credit
for returns
Alternative to reshipment, the customer may request a credit for the items
being returned. The credit, too, may be on hold until the items are received
from the customer or may be issued immediately. It will create a credit memo
in Order Entry that can be processed as other credits.
Receipt
of returned goods
Items being returned can be received into a material review location to allow
returned items to be inspected prior to receipt into inventory. This allows
damaged items to be kept from being shipped to an unsuspecting customer. The
items awaiting review may be rejected from or received into standard parts
or finished goods inventory at the discretion of the parts inspector. Advanced
Distribution helps your organization run more efficiently and effectively.
It contributes by accurately calculating the total cost of your products,
alerting you to items requiring quality inspection, allocating items appropriately
for different customers, minimizing labor cost and misallocated physical space
and correctly tracking inventory quantities and customer returns.
Hard
allocation
ADIS allows you to use hard allocation in addition to soft allocation. Using
hard allocation, you commit specific serial, lot and/or bin numbers to an
order during the order entry process. This is beneficial when specific lots
must remain together. For example, when painting a large area, a painter will
prefer to use cans of paint from the same lot to avoid even slightly mismatched
colors.
Inspecting
for quality
When material arrives at your dock, not all of it may be in acceptable condition.
This may not be immediately apparent and the possibility exists that you won’t
know this until you perform an inspection of the newly received goods.
Macola ES provides a process
to handle these situations. The Receiving Inspection application allows you
to enter receipts as you normally would, thus recording the receipt date necessary
for updating receipt and vendor delivery performance data. The goods are then
quarantined until they pass through a multi-step inspection and disposition
process.
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