Customers usually tend to plan their orders to ensure the availability of raw material stocks at the supplier’s premises and to guarantee the delivery schedules.
Orders can therefore have certain levels of “certainty”, for example:

• Planned orders (the quantities are only indicative, useful for MP demand and production capacity planning)
• Projected orders (the quantities may vary, but not by much, making it possible to assess the raw material’s need and make purchases)
• Confirmed orders (the customer undertakes to satisfy ordered quantities of finished products with minimum flexibility)

Managing this information is primarily useful in planning of requested production volumes in advance, prompt provisioning of necessary raw material and applying the Delivery Plan also for suppliers and contactors, to allow them a proper planning too.
Some raw materials have lead times that are longer than the confirmed order “window”. This entails “blind” ordering, with the consequent risk of overestimating purchases or underestimating necessary quantities. With Mago4 Open Orders module you can use
all the advanced features to evaluate whether or not to confirm suggested sales orders and easily generate a detailed Delivery Plan for raw materials, to be sent to the supplier, with various levels of certainty on quantities. Additionally, this module allows you to consult
at any time the history of changes made by customers, in order to have a help in event of claims and for contract review statistics.
Lastly, MRP analysis provides you a clear read-out of degree of certainty on suggested quantities.

LIST OF REQUISITES

The Open Orders module extends Sales Orders module functions, making it possible to set degree of certainty as a parameter and providing you an easier order entry and maintenance “display”.
The feature of these Open and Scheduled Orders is to not have a set “life cycle”, but to remain active for an indefinite period of time, during which you can queue new  confirmed quantities. As the weeks go by, the orders change their degree of confirmation and then remain in the database as filled orders.
Mago4 Open Orders provides you with the following features:

• Customer Contracts management
• Delivery Plan management
• Editing of MRP procedure

You can also carry out single contract division to manage weekly or monthly quantities on individual days.

CUSTOMER CONTRACTS MANAGEMENT

The definition of the Customer Contract is necessary to determine not only a univocal reference that “keeps together” all sales orders that form the Delivery Plan for a customer, but also its actual structure. You can manage an arbitrary number of “confirmation levels”, each distinguished by customized visual attributes (colors, descriptions, etc.).
The contract window definition grid contains the “delivery division” parameter that enables the division option for all cells that meet the period. Possible detail is always by day.

CUSTOMER CONTRACT ENTRY AND MAINTENANCE

The Customer Contract defines the composition and division of deliveries. You can find the basic Contract data in a specific grid that shows levels of quantity confirmation. The levels are calculated by default depending on the period of validity, but you can always manually edit them.

CONFIRMATION LEVEL

The level of confirmation in used to define which and how many slots of uncertainty are managed by the company. This information always appears in the various contexts (Delivery Plan definition, Manufacturing Order confirmation, Purchase request, Report, ecc.) and allows you to make the appropriate decisions.

DELIVERY PLAN MANAGEMENT

Delivery Plans are specifically structured to:

• provide a “global” vision of the activities underway for a particular customer, with graphic evidence of the reliability of the various quantities;
• semi-automatically manage the “progress” of quantity reliability degrees as weeks pass;
• transparently manage the Sales Orders corresponding to the Delivery Plan, automatically inserting, amending and deleting rows.

Sales Orders in a Delivery Plan are made so that you can instantly distinguish them from the standard ones; we recommend you to modify them only within the Plan, just to take full advantage of all the potential and to avoid possible mistakes.
Each row of the Plan contains the level of quantity confirmation, which does not depend strictly on the proximity of the date. The level can be manually or semi-automatically “advanced” during the Delivery Plan analysis, ensuring you always have
an effective control.

DELIVERY PLAN ENTRY AND MAINTENANCE

Mago4 loads the Delivery Plan from the Customer Contract number that defines it. Accordingly, the grid is populated with the data of Sales Orders still to be processed, whose delivery date is expected to be the same as or later than the current date.
If there are several sales order rows in the same period, that period is considered as divided by day.
All the rows belonging to a period are then totaled: you can find the result in a special cell together with a bitmap that represents the division by day.
Analyzing the Delivery Plan you can easily assess forecasted quantities.
It is important to note that, while the column structure depends on Customer contract settings, the color of the cells instead refers to the corresponding orders: this feature is
designed to stress the importance of updating the level of confirmation situation. This update can be done individually for quantity, or globally for the entire Plan.
You can always insert or edit quantities of the cells or product rows, and a functional toolbar provides you with further editing functions.
When you have finished inserting or editing operations in the Delivery Plan, just press the confirmation button to align all Orders: present ones are updated, excluded ones are inserted.

DELIVERY QUANTITY DIVISION

The window is easily viewable and presents a table with a row for each day of the period (e.g. 7 rows for the “Weekly” periodicity). In the heading you will find a field indicating the suspended quantity to be delivered, relative to the previous periods.

MRP ANALYSIS

Mago4 adapts the MRP processing by keeping separate proposals covering demand with different levels of confirmation. The demands are therefore managed as if they refer to different products.
You will also be able to see the Confirmation Level during the Inventory Availability Forecast, Production Orders confirmation and Purchase Request confirmation phases.

REPORTING

Open Orders provides you with a complete series of reports for inventory forecasting, raw material and outsourcing reservation forecasting, delivery plans for raw material suppliers, etc. The Delivery Plan can also be printed thanks to a specific report.