Hi all,
We have a growing made-to-order business which we outsource the components of our products, then assemble them in-house.
We currently work with Sage 50 Accounts Professional and an Excel sheet to generate our Purchase Orders but as the business grows, we're finding we're outgrowing both when it comes to order tracking.
Our current process is very manual:
- Customer places an order
- Sales staff will input the order into Sage 50.
- Sales staff will then create Purchase Orders for our various outsourced suppliers for the various components - this can either be physical parts or a service; e.g metal polishing. Depending on what the customer orders, this can range from one Purchase Order, up to 5.
- Purchase Orders are then emailed using Sage 50 to our suppliers.
- The sales person will then manually enter the Purchase Orders, Customer Order number and and relevant ETA dates in our shared Spreadsheet.
It's a lengthy process and prone to mistakes. We also have no way of being notified if any of the outsourced processes are exceeding their expected completion time. For example, if we assume each process takes 1 week, we will want to be notified when it's been 1 week and 1 day so we can start chasing our suppliers for updates.
So what we're looking for must achieve a few main things:
- Order Tracking Automation - notify our staff when supplier orders are running over their expected lead times.
- Automatic Purchase Order Generation - If Product A requires a 4-step process, at 4 different suppliers then we want a system smart enough to automatically generate that.
- Easy Order Tracking from our staff's point of view - If a customer calls and wants an update on their order, we'd like to be able to tell them what stage their order is at.
I appreciate any suggestions you may have & thank you in advance.