Customer Replenishment 

Purpose

If you operate vendor-managed inventory (VMI), you use this process to plan replenishments for customers.

Vendor-Managed Inventory (VMI) is one of the strategies aimed at enhancing the efficiency of the supply chain under the umbrella of Efficient Consumer Response (ECR). VMI is a service that manufacturers offer retailers, whereby manufacturers take over the task of replenishing their products at retail outlets.

Prerequisites

The process is based on customer stock and sales data. The customer must have sent you this data beforehand, and it must be available in your system. Data can be transferred to R/3 using the EDI messages PROACT, WPUBON (from POS systems) and WPUUMS (from POS systems). You can also maintain customer stock and sales figures manually in the system.

If the target stock is to be based on future sales (dynamic target stock), you first have to forecast the sales data.

Steps in the Process

  1. You plan replenishments either manually (on-line) or in the background (in batch) for selected customers and articles.
  2. The system determines those articles requiring replenishing and calculates the replenishment quantities using the stock and sales data.
  3. If you have triggered Replenishment manually, you can change the replenishment requirements.
  4. The system passes on the replenishment quantities for further processing, and sales orders are created. The system can, if required, also round off order quantities.
  5. The replenishment stock figure is corrected in line with the document quantities (rounded figures).

Result

The replenishment planning run results in sales orders that you transfer to the customer by EDI in the form of an order acknowledgment.