Can you trust Infor FACTS to tell you when it’s time to replenish products in your warehouses? Of course, you can. If you don’t trust FACTS to guide warehouse product replenishment, it’s time to review your data parameters and Order Point (OP) adjusters.
Understanding your FACTS data is key to optimizing the product replenishment process. As a former FACTS user and application consultant I want to focus on how OP for FACTS v7.8+ can hone your product replenishment process.
What Affects Order Points?
Order Points are affected by usage, lead time, and safety stock. When issues occur with calculated replenishment values it helps to understand the relationship between these variables to determine how to best address and remedy the situation.
Ask Yourself the Following:
Check your replenishment parameters for lead time and safety stock. Prolonged supply chain lead times have caused it to be difficult to secure products than ever before.
As a reminder, lead time (LT) impacts your safety stock. If you review your safety stock and think FACTS is not calculating accurately, review your parameters on safety stock. There are parameters for minimum and maximum on safety stock.
Types of Item Order Points for FACTS:
Calculated OP is required and is generally the only type needed for most items. The other OPs listed above are optional and are not intended to be used globally. If you choose to use any other type of OPs than Calculated OP, FACTS will default to the highest value OP.
What if you have several customers that order small quantities of a product and one customer that orders many units at a time?
You want to be sure you have enough product on the floor in the event this customer places an order. To achieve this, FACTS has Average Shipment Quantity (ASQ) OP and Five-high Order Point. ASQ works well if there are few shipments with large quantities. Five-high ASQ is helpful in cases where you have a few customers who buy in large quantities and many who buy in smaller quantities.
Threshold Minimum vs Freezing Order Points
Setting a Threshold Minimum (T-Min) OP can be useful when you don’t want stock levels to drop below a specific point. Whereas Freezing OP waits until it gets to the assigned replenishment value. The advantage of T-Min vs Freezing OPs is if you have your T-Min set at a minimum value and FACTS calculates your OP higher than the set minimum, FACTS defaults to the higher value.
After reading this I hope that you’ve found more insight into optimizing your warehouse product replenishment process. Feel free to reach out and contact us if you need any help reviewing your data, replenishment parameters, and OP adjusters to get the most out of FACTS replenishment data.
Kathy is an Aktion Application Consultant and former TUG board member with extensive experience helping Infor FACTS users optimize their application by providing experience, best practices, and related processes.