Business workflow

Auto Replenishment provides the following workflow for you to manage your inventory replenishment process.

• Generate replenishment plan – Supply Planning generates the replenishment plan according to the configured schedule. Recent input data required to generate replenishment plans is retrieved from the AWS Supply Chain data lake. Supply Planning uses configuration data, transactional data, and plan settings to generate the replenishment plan that includes purchase order requests.

• Review plan exceptions – Supply Planning generates Plan Exceptions for products and site combinations that do not have either required configuration data (lead time, sourcing schedule, and so on) or required transactional data, such as on-hand inventory. Planners can review exceptions and provide required data before the next planning cycle in order to correct the issues and generate the replenishment plan.

• Review and approve purchase order requests – Generated purchase order requests are either auto-approved or flagged for manual approval, depending on the configured approval criteria in the plan settings. Planners can review, override, or approve purchase order requests by using AWS Supply Chain.

  • Users can manually update the order quantity, order-by date, and expected delivery date for system-generated purchase order requests. Once updated, users can mark these orders as Firmed and rerun the plan in ad-hoc mode by choosing Run Plan in the top-right corner of the page. When the plan runs, the system preserves Firmed purchase order requests and recalculates all planning measures on the Replenishment Plan page. It then automatically synchronizes the updated planning data with the supply_plan entity in the Data Lake. The next scheduled plan run will clear Firmed purchase order requests and generate new ones based on current data.

• Publish to outbound – Approved (auto or manual) purchase order requests are published to the outbound Amazon S3 at the configured schedule in Plan Settings. You can integrate these purchase order requests to your ERP or purchasing systems for execution. Purchase order requests that get converted to purchase orders are ingested back to the AWS Supply Chain data lake by using inbound connectors. AWS Supply Chain expects these purchase orders to carry the reference to the original purchase order request. This reference helps in tracking the conversion of purchase order requests to purchase orders.