Order Processing

This module provides sales order entry and performs the shipping, billing, and general customer service functions of a business. The sales order subsystem maintains customer information and provides status for quotations, regular orders, blanket orders, and backorder releases. From order entry through shipping, customer orders are processed on-line. Inquiries allow you to track the status of each order.

Orders can be priced using contracts, standard warehouse prices, or customized price lists. You can also choose to enter prices manually. You can define price lists in any currency and can maintain prices on a mass basis to facilitate price conversions. A pricing template feature allows you to relate price lists and discounts to customers, orders, and part characteristics, giving you the flexibility you need to define pricing and discounting strategies.

MAC-PAC XE also supports customer discounts such as percent discount, quantity price break, and no-charge (for a sample order). Additionally, volume, header, and line-level discounts can be defined with effectivity dates. These discounts can be applied directly to sales orders or will be automatically applied using discount templates.

Pricing and discounting templates facilitate the automatic retrieval and application of price lists and/or discounts. Templates match pre-defined order, customer, and line-related characteristics with the orders created in MAC-PAC XE. A few examples include pricing group, customer class, order class, bill-to/ship-to, as well as four user-defined pricing keys. MAC-PAC XE supports multiple options for sourcing customer orders. Orders can be taken at one site and shipped from another directly to the customer, without having to re-enter information at each location. The remote site can be a distribution warehouse, a manufacturing plant, or even a vendor.

You can consolidate shipments into loads, and highlight loads where the estimated weight and volume exceed capacity of the planned shipping method. You can consolidate shipments from multiple orders into one picking document. The shipping workbench allows you to record the shipment of inventory as well as create bills of lading, packing lists, and shipping labels from one easy-to-use conversation. If goods must be returned, the Order Processing module allows you to assign a return merchandise authorization number, record the receipt, adjust inventory, create a credit memo, and send a replacement shipment in a single conversation. For each order, the system maintains records of the quantity shipped, creates billing documents, and updates Accounts Receivable. This information is then used in the Sales Analysis module to track sales activity.

Expert Configurator

The Expert Configurator module helps you manage the sales and manufacturing process in make-to-order or assemble-to-order environments. Maintaining information for items that offer many features and options can be difficult. The Expert Configurator allows you to define rules indicating what options are available and how each option affects design and price.

Rules are used to individualize the order entry process interactively-data entry personnel are prompted only for information appropriate to options the customer has already chosen. The rules are also used to determine product price. Because all of the information is available on-line, data entry personnel can quickly answer customers' questions about what option combinations are available and how much they will cost.

In manufacturing environments, rules also specify labor and component requirements and manufacturing method. When a custom order is received, the Expert Configurator module generates production orders with specific component and labor steps and purchase requisitions with configured specifications. Product costs can be generated based on the unique bill of material and routing configured for the order.

The rules you define can be changed at any time; replaced rules are maintained with version numbers, should a need ever arise to retrieve past product design or pricing methods.

Sales Analysis

This module meets the functional requirements for capturing customer activity, tracking sales, monitoring sales performance, comparing prior and current year statistics, and enforcing management policy. It allows for timely management reporting and detailed budget control, with support for controlling exceptions. Budgets for financial, statistical, and gross margin data can be compared to actual sales figures through reports and on-line inquiries. Sales transactions resulting from order processing, shipping/billing, and post billing functions provide the detailed information for analyzing sales and printing reports as well as for accumulating total sales by period.

Synchro

Synchro is a just-in-time distribution solution that is designed to handle frequent deliveries to high-volume customers in an efficient and individually tailored manner. Originally developed for the automotive industry, Synchro applies to a broad range of manufacturing and distribution environments.

It receives electronic delivery requests, splits and offsets them according to the customer's delivery rules, feeds demand into MAC-PAC XE, prints customer shipping labels, creates shipping lists, sends invoices and shipping lists, and maintains detailed customer synchronization data to ensure the shipped quantities are accurate.

Delivery requests, shipping lists, and invoices can be communicated electronically, using a variety of electronic data interchange standards. Even if you choose not to use EDI, Synchro gives you the power and flexibility to become a just-in-time supplier for your customers.

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