AcumatiCaresNever run out of stock again. Distribution Requirements Planning (DRP) intelligently plans your inventory for optimal customer satisfaction.
Product
Distribution Requirements Planning (DRP)
Optimize inventory levels to meet supply needs.
DRP keeps the right products in the right place at the right time. It uses forecasts and real customer demand to optimize inventory plans for kit assemblies, kit component requirements, purchase orders, and warehouse transfers. This helps you:
- Boost customer satisfaction: By ensuring you have what customers need when they need it.
- Cut costs: Reduce carrying costs by avoiding excess inventory and expensive rush orders.
- Make smarter decisions: With clear insights into which supply orders needs to be moved, expedited, or canceled.
Key Benefits of DRP ERP for Your Company
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Time-Phased Inventory Planning
DRP software helps businesses optimize inventory levels by time-phasing suggested supply orders coupled with optional demand forecasts to ensure that the right amount of stock is in the right place at the right time. This reduces the risk of stockouts and overstocking, leading to lower carrying costs and improved cash flow.
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Improved Collaboration
DRP software can foster better collaboration between different departments within a business, such as sales, warehouse management, and logistics. This is because everyone is working from the same data and can see how their decisions impact other parts of the supply chain.
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Reduced Costs
DRP software helps businesses reduce ordering costs, transportation costs, and inventory holding costs. This is achieved through better supply chain planning and coordination.
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Faster Decision Making
DRP software provides businesses with real-time data and insights that can be used to make faster and more informed decisions about inventory levels, kit assemblies and kit requirements, and transportation.
Important Features of Distribution Requirements Planning Software
Varied Strategies
Acumatica includes robust inventory replenishment to define min and max order quantities, reorder points, seasonality, lead times, safety stock, and forecast models to calculate replenishment. Inventory replenishment may be used for specific inventory items, such as low-cost, high-volume items, while DRP may be used for other items that require manual demand forecasts, kitting, or time-phased inventory planning.
Forecasting
Forecasts can be calculated or entered manually. These forecasts can be dependent and consumed by sales orders, or they can be independent. Input forecasts as one-time, weekly, monthly, or yearly.
DRP Planning Detail
Review and execute the complete time-phased inventory plan through DRP inventory planning screens that show all activity, orders, requirements, balances, and recommendations for each inventory item.
Multi-Warehouse
Manage procurement and transfers across warehouse locations. DRP suggests planned orders that drive requirements throughout your organization to supply warehouses down to your vendors.
DRP Days Supply
Define planning buckets to consolidate demand into single purchase orders. Planned period sizes are defined by item class, stock item, or item and warehouse combination.
Grace Period
Set a grace period for the number of days after receipt where a supply transaction is considered to meet the requested date for item demand.
Transfers
Balance supply and demand for planned inbound and outbound transfer orders across warehouse locations.
Blanket Sales Orders
As forecasted demand, blanket sales order lines for future dates are included in DRP planning. Child sales orders released from blanket orders are processed as normal sales order demand.
Order Quantities
DRP uses safety stock and reorder point levels to determine quantities for planned orders. Further, users can set minimum and maximum order quantities for suggested orders or preferred supplier order quantities. Lot sizes are used to smooth demand quantities by defined multiples. For example, a lot size of 5 and demand for 37 units would result in a planned order for 40 (rounded up from 37 in a multiple of 5).
Order Lead Times
DRP respects vendor lead times defined in inventory for purchased items. Users can set additional lead time when the product may need to be quarantined and inspected before it is moved to an on-hand warehouse location. Lead times are also defined for transfers between warehouse locations.
DRP History and Audit
Benchmark previous DRP generations to evaluate past DRP performance to understand if generation times varied due to larger date ranges, setup issues, or other factors.
Kits and Components
Generate suggested kit assemblies based on forecasts or actual sales order demand. DRP will suggest planned purchase orders and warehouse transfer orders for kit components required for stock or non-stock kit assemblies.
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