Transferring Sales/Stock Data to Vendors 

Purpose

You use this process to transfer information on sales data, stock levels and open purchase order quantities (quantities on-order) by electronic data interchange (EDI) to your vendors. You can specify the sites for which you want to transfer data, and to which vendors. Data can be transferred as part of the following strategies:

If vendors have access to information on their customer sales data, they can improve long-term planning, respond faster to customer requirements and increase the vendor service level without managing customer inventory.

Using the sales data, vendors can forecast future expected sales of the articles concerned at their customers’ sites. Vendors first of all plan replenishments for the articles based on the current stock levels and any forecast values. Vendors are responsible for planning replenishments of their products at the customer’s.

A vendor is category captain. As such, not only is the vendor responsible for planning replenishments of their products at a retailer, the vendor is also responsible for planning replenishments of other products in the same category.

Prerequisites

Profiles must be defined in the vendor master to control article and other data selected for transfer. If the system is unable to find a control profile in the vendor master, it uses a default profile that you can enter when selecting the sites and vendors.

Process flow

  1. You enter the vendors and sites, and indicate the past period (as of today) for which you want to transfer sales data.
  2. If required, enter a control profile that should be used if none is found in the vendor master record.
  3. The system finds - for each combination of vendor and site - the articles that can be procured from the vendor and are maintained in the site entered.
  4. The system finds the control profile valid for each article/vendor/site combination.
  5. The system analyzes the selection key for the control profile and finds all the articles for which data is to be transferred.
  6. The system uses the control profile to determines the sales data and stock figures for the articles concerned.
  7. You transfer the IDoc.

Result

The system generates an IDoc containing the relevant stock figures and sales data for each combination of vendor and site. The IDoc is sent to the vendor by EDI.