Bramvia — Business Central Experts
Deciding purchases item by item, with a spreadsheet and gut feeling, ends in stockouts and dead stock. How the ERP proposes purchases from real demand, lead times and safety stock.
Short answer: instead of reviewing items one by one, the ERP works out every day what to buy, how much and when, from real demand, open orders, each vendor's lead time and safety stock. The buyer reviews the proposal and turns it into purchase orders in one click. At 800 items reviewed a month, moving to proposal review saves around 15 hours a month, and above all cuts stockouts and dead stock.
Next step: see below how stock evolves week by week and when stockouts would hit.
The problem: buying on gut feeling
With thousands of items, nobody can review them all every week. People buy what they remember, what a rep asks for urgently or what they bought last year. The result is stockouts in what sells and dead stock in what doesn't.
How the ERP does it
- Calculates demand from history, seasonality and open orders.
- Uses lead times for each vendor and safety stock for each item.
- Proposes purchases: what, how much, from whom and when, grouped by vendor.
- Warns about expected stockouts and stock that hasn't moved for months.
- Creates purchase orders when the buyer approves.
What a person still does
The buyer decides: negotiates, adjusts for a promotion or a supplier change, and approves. Instead of reviewing items one by one, they handle exceptions and negotiate better. With tariffs moving, landed cost per receipt belongs in the same decision.
A worked example
| Before | With automatic proposals | |
|---|---|---|
| Items reviewed a month | 800 | 800 |
| Time per item | 1.5 minutes | 0.3 minutes |
| Hours a month | 20 | 4 |
| Time freed | 16 hours a month |
The big saving is not that: it is the stock. If better purchasing takes inventory days from 70 to 60 with $20,000 a day of cost of goods sold, about $200,000 of working capital is freed, and stockouts stop costing sales.
In Business Central
The planning and requisition worksheets calculate proposals from each item's parameters (reorder point, safety stock, lead time), and the sales forecast can use AI models. See buffer inventory and days inventory outstanding for the numbers.
FAQ
What if demand changes suddenly? The proposal is recalculated daily from real orders; the buyer adjusts the exceptions.
Does it work for imports with long lead times? Yes, with each vendor's real lead time and the landed cost of each receipt.
How much does it save? In time, hours a month; in money, mostly less dead stock and fewer lost sales. Run your numbers in the AI hours calculator.
Related: dead stock and inventory carrying cost.
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