Remote Sourcing Methods

Remote sourcing involves creating a tie between a sales order line and a purchase order line.  This is done using a purchase order requisition.

Sales orders can be created manually, by converting a quote order, or via EDI transmission.  When creating a sales order, each sales order line is evaluated by a set of criterion assigned to its customer, vendor, and item to determine whether the sales order line should be sourced locally or remotely.  The system also determines whether or not the sales order line should be sent directly to an end customer.

If you decide to remotely source the sales order line, a purchase order requisition must be created to transfer the request that you received from your customer into a request to create a purchase order for your vendor.  Once this is done, a purchase order needs to be created to cover the requisition.  Because the requisition transfers information from the sales order to the purchase order the tie between the sales order and the purchase order is complete.

Remote sourcing can be done two ways:  with the automatic generation of requisitions and purchase orders or by manually creating a tie between a sales order, a requisition, and a purchase order.

Automatic Purchase Order Generation

The Automatic Purchase Order Generation flag indicates whether MAC-PAC will automatically create purchase orders for requisitions that are generated directly from sales order lines and are to be remotely sourced.  Valid values are Y (yes) and N (no).  Purchase orders will only be created if the Automatic Purchase Order Generation flag stored on the Vendor Master File is set to Y (yes) and if all validation criterion used in the asynchronous purchase order generation program is satisfied.  Otherwise, purchase orders will not be automatically created and must therefore be created manually.

Using automatic purchase order generation, one purchase order is created for all sales order lines that are:  from the same order/release, sourced from the same vendor, and have the same shipment type.  The purchase orders created by the asynchronous program will always be single release orders.  This is important if you want to process inbound purchase order acknowledgments using an EDI transaction.  For more information about this processing, refer to the EDI Transaction Processing Key Concept in the Electronic Data Interchange User Manual.

Manual Processing

If either the customer or the item prohibit remote sourcing, MAC-PAC will not automatically create the required requisition.  It is still possible to remote source the order, however, the tie between the sales order and the purchase order must be created manually.

Creating the tie manually can be done using two online conversations:  Requisition Maintenance and Purchase Order Maintenance.  The first step is to create the requisition needed to cover the sales order line.  This is done by entering the sales order information on the Requisition Line Detail screen.  Then use the requisition to transfer information to the purchase order line.  This will create a link from the purchase order line to the sales order.