Smart Buying: Procurement Precision with Trak-Suite
The Role of Purchasing Personnel
Your procurement department and its purchasing agents sit at the center of your manufacturing ecosystem, responsible for the strategic sourcing of raw materials, managing supplier relationships, and ensuring that the supply chain operates without a hitch. Their contributions are critical to maintaining the balance between cost, quality, and timely delivery, which are essential for the success of any manufacturing business.
Responsibilities of your purchasing personnel include building and leading relationships with key suppliers, negotiating and working within supply agreements, measuring and communicating supplier performance, managing inventory, and working closely with various departments to resolve urgent material supply issues.
They have a major role in executing your business’s overall operational strategy, so the efficacy of the systems they use to execute their responsibilities is vitally important to every aspect of the manufacturing process. They need to be able to simultaneously track important ordering, shipping, and inventory data, while also efficiently and effectively communicating with both internal stakeholders, as well as suppliers, shippers, and other third-parties integral to the manufacturing process.
Trak-Suite is the leading solution for scaling purchasing and procurement in manufacturing, offering a suite of applications and services designed to integrate with Infor SyteLine ERP. This comprehensive toolset equips purchasing agents with the necessary resources to excel, providing real-time dataflows and streamlined integration across departments. In this next installment in our series, we’ll explore how adopting Trak-Suite will enable procurement personnel to better and more effectively manage costs, foster strong supplier relationships, and ensure the consistent quality and availability of inventory.
Tackling Procurement Challenges with Trak-Suite
Purchasing personnel in the manufacturing industry face a multitude of challenges that can impact efficiency, quality, profitability, and cash flow. To function at their peak, purchasers need to precisely manage inventory and efficiently coordinate with vendors and maintain those important relationships using trusted communications channels.
By leveraging the power of Trak-Suite, purchasing personnel have the applications and tools they need to address these challenges. Let’s look at a few common applications of Trak-Suite and how purchasers stand to benefit.
Overcoming Inventory Dilemmas with Fact-Trak
The accuracy of inventory levels is critical for ensuring that production lines operate smoothly without unnecessary delays or excess costs. Purchasing personnel depend on precise inventory data, but their job is often complicated by the fact that it isn’t always quick or easy to ascertain accurate stocking levels from traditional ERP systems, leading to either overstocking, which ties up capital and storage space, or understocking, which can halt production.
Purchasing personnel must also balance the line between ordering new stock and utilizing what's already in inventory. This requires strategic decision-making and frequent communication with inventory control staff to verify the quantities on hand, a process that can be time-consuming and prone to errors.
Trak-Suite's Fact-Trak offers a solution to these challenges by providing a transparent view of inventory specifics, built on best practices in inventory control management. This clarity empowers purchasers with timely and accurate information, enabling them to make informed decisions about when and how much to order.
With Fact-Trak, purchasing personnel can confidently manage inventory levels, reducing the risk of overstocking or understocking. Fact-Trak allows them to streamline the procurement process and help make sure that production can proceed without interruption, contributing to the efficiency and profitability of the entire manufacturing operation.
Streamlining Vendor Coordination with APS Made Easier™
Coordinating with vendors is a critical aspect of the procurement process, but it comes with its own set of challenges for purchasing personnel. One of the primary difficulties is determining the optimal timing for placing orders. This decision needs to be carefully aligned with production schedules to time the delivery of materials exactly when they are needed, avoiding both delays in production and excess inventory.
The dynamics of working with multiple vendors add another layer of complexity, as each supplier may have different lead times, capacities, and reliability levels. Ensuring a smooth and timely flow of materials from various vendors requires meticulous planning, coordination, and constant communication.
APS Made Easier, a component of Trak-Suite, offers a solution to these challenges by providing schedule assurance. With APS Made Easier, purchasing personnel gain a clear and confident understanding of the production schedule, which in turn allows them to plan procurement activities with greater precision. This assurance in the production timeline enables better coordination with vendors, ensuring that orders are placed at the right time and materials are delivered in alignment with production needs. The result is a more efficient and reliable procurement process that supports uninterrupted production and optimal inventory management.
Simplifying Kanban Replenishments with Shop-Trak
Purchasing’s worst nightmare includes high volume use materials that are hard to track. The effort it takes to verify quantities for such items to make sure the right amount of material is ordered consumes significant amounts of time. Shop-Trak can simplify that process with its Kanban Replenishment capabilities.
Right from the shop floor, workers simply scan a bin to reorder material that is repetitively used. Kanban Replenishments in Shop-Trak support single and multiple bin systems that streamline the ordering and notification process to suppliers, while allowing purchasing to save time so they can concentrate on other key materials. Shop-Trak customers have even replaced vendor managed inventory and reduced the stocking levels in the process without sacrificing material availability.
Shop-Trak becomes a key delegation tool for purchasing professionals by shifting the replenishment process from purchasing to the shop floor, while still providing oversight, control, speed, and consistency to the process. Kanban Replenishments are highly effective when materials are stocked in the warehouse, as well as throughout the shop at the point of use. Replenishment signals could come in for many items all day long, with Shop-Trak consolidating the signals to the appropriate suppliers.
Enhancing PO Email Clarity with Doc-Trak
ERP systems often generate outbound purchase order (PO) emails that are poorly formatted and resemble phishing attempts more than legitimate business communications. This creates confusion and mistrust among suppliers and increases the risk of important information being delayed, overlooked, or even dismissed. Ensuring that PO emails are clear, professional, and easily recognizable is vital for maintaining strong supplier relationships and ensuring the smooth execution of orders.
Doc-Trak, a component of Trak-Suite, addresses this challenge with its email automation feature. With just a few simple clicks, purchasing personnel can send out all their purchase orders, complete with the necessary documents such as drawings and terms and conditions, in an email format that clearly identifies the organization. At the same time, Doc-Trak archives the document in a convenient, simple and consistent way on your internal file system, SharePoint 365, or in another desired cloud storage location. If you are a Department of Defense supplier, Doc-Trak has the artificial intelligence to determine which purchase orders are DoD sensitive and archive them in a DoD approved cloud repository.
Doc-Trak both streamlines the process of sending POs and significantly reduces the risk to suppliers by providing them with easily identifiable and trustworthy communication. By leveraging Doc-Trak's email automation, purchasing personnel can consistently send PO emails that are professional, clear, and effective, leading to better communication, stronger partnerships, and easier collaboration with suppliers.
Final Thoughts
Trak-Suite offers a comprehensive solution to the challenges faced by procurement departments, providing the tools and applications that empower purchasers with the clarity, confidence, and efficiency they need. By leveraging Fact-Trak, APS Made Easier, Shop-Trak, and Doc-Trak, as well as the other applications and services that comprise Trak-Suite’s groundbreaking system, purchasing agents can effectively manage inventory, coordinate with vendors, and streamline purchase order communications, driving the smooth operation and success of the manufacturing process.
We invite you to contact us for a demo to see firsthand how Trak-Suite brings efficiency and innovation to manufacturing, helping to improve profitability and ensure the consistent quality and availability of inventory.
