Flexible Customer Scheduling = Flawless Execution = Favorable Customers
Customer scheduled orders can be challenging to manage and maintain, particularly when they are sent via EDI directly from your customer to your QAD system. Viewing and making changes to orders in the QAD system can be time-consuming.
Customers can send both long- and short-term schedules against the same order. Long-term schedules are generally more for planning purposes while short-term are the more firmed up reality. There are often changes in demand between the long- and short-term schedules that can be tricky to manage.
For example, you may receive a 4-week schedule from your customer, and later they will send significant changes to the needs for week 4. When those orders go directly into QAD through EDI, it can wreak havoc with your inventory and production schedules and make for an unhappy customer.
So, how can you easily make sure that any changes made along the way don’t cause inventory shortages or production delays when meeting customer schedules is critical?
That’s where our Customer Schedule Data Loader with new enhanced features comes in. With the Data Loader, you can download the orders and compare them to each other. You can see what changes there are and react quickly to those changes so you can keep your customer happy. You may need to increase inventory from a supplier, adjust production schedule, etc.
The new enhancements allow more flexibility in optimizing your existing resources and simplifying the plan, which will lead to flawless execution by the staff and eliminate costly errors.
The Customer Schedule Data Loader also helps with operational smoothing and can help to close schedules that are no longer valid. For example, your customer changes a part number and includes the new part number on a scheduled order. The old part number, which is still in your system, is now invalid but is still in the Customer Schedule in QAD. So essentially you have duplicate component demands – one for the new part number and one for the old part number. The Data Loader allows you to download and fix the data that are no longer valid and close the appropriate schedules.
If you don’t use EDI to create customer schedules, the Customer Schedule Data Loader will help you create and manage customer schedules more efficiently. It is a powerful, scalable solution that eliminates manual input into QAD and saves you numerous labor hours when processing customer schedule data.
To find out more about this tool and its new enhancements, watch our webinar replay, Customer Schedules: Flexible and Flawless .
