One thing that every company lacks in their supply chain is visibility. Orderlink’s focal problem space is the purchasing process. Each company has its own purchasing process and has different reasons for purchasing goods. Whether it’s for ordering raw materials for your production factory or ordering pens for the office, every company has a purchasing element.

 

What is visibility and why do you need it?

When you place a purchase order how do you know when your goods will arrive?

This can be an impossible question to answer as different suppliers have different lead times and can be dependent on the contents of your order. There are several reasons for varying lead times: What is the supplier’s location? Are the contents of your order already in stock? How long does it take to manufacture these contents? What freight service is being used? As a buyer, we need the answers to these questions to gain visibility over our company’s incoming goods.

Getting the answers to these questions can be a strenuous task. As a buyer when our boss or colleague asks how far away their goods are we call and email suppliers with a follow-up query to keep them in the loop. Without our separate inquiry, it is uncommon for a supplier to provide a clear and accurate lead time upon accepting an order. In companies with multiple orders on the go from multiple suppliers, as buyers, we are endlessly inquiring about status updates from suppliers to provide updates to other stakeholders within our business. We find ourselves wishing our boss or colleague would just inquire themselves so we can stop bothering our suppliers. But this is our job, right?

Lead times are a necessary and important metric for a business’s operations. Strict requirement dates may be set for your goods as you may need them to assemble part of a sale you have committed to. Or it may be that you are using an overseas supplier where goods take a long time to arrive and travel by sea. You don’t want to risk running out of a material, but you don’t want to overstock either and incur a high holding cost. Lead times are crucial to determining when to place an order and at what inventory holding level.

Often the worker receiving your orders doesn’t know all the factors involved when providing a lead time. No supplier wants to over-promise and under-deliver, so they are reluctant to provide a black-and-white lead time. As a result, we are constrained to a lead time that is a best guess and not accurate. But as a buyer, we need accurate lead times and status updates as to where in the supply chain our goods are. Lack of transparent information on delays of our incoming goods can cause interruptions and last-minute panics. An informed plan turns into a reactionary firefight to keep the production line running, deliver a completed project on time or keep your labouring staff busy.

 

How does Orderlink provide visibility?

ERP/MRP - Our product will integrate with your existing ERP/MRP software. Manual data entry into our software isn’t required.

Order dashboard - When an order is created in your ERP system it syncs with your order dashboard. In your dashboard, you can view all open orders, filter by supplier, the status of each order and communicate with suppliers with a chat feature. We set up Orderlink accounts for all relevant internal stakeholders of your company, so they have easy access to order information at any time. Our order dashboard is user-friendly and can be customised by individual users so information on their dashboard best fits their purpose. This eliminates the need for buyers to provide constant internal status updates.

AI / Automation - Orderlink sends automated status update requests to suppliers for each stage of the supply chain your order is in. Artificial intelligence can detect updates from your supplier and update your order dashboard accordingly. You can acquire status updates for every order throughout its journey through the supply chain. This significantly reduces follow-up queries and the constant need to pester suppliers for updates.

 

Orderlink provides a central source of truth over your purchase orders and makes the entirety of your company’s purchasing process smooth and efficient. It frees up your time by automating processes that were previously done manually allowing you to focus on other important areas of your job.