Order Analyst: Buy inventory from the lowest-cost EDI suppliers

Note: This feature only applies to stores that actively use one or more of these EDI suppliers:

• Ace Hardware
• Orgill Hardware
• True Value Hardware
• Emery Jensen Distribution (EJD)
• House Hasson

The money you invest in your store’s inventory has a direct and significant impact on your bottom line. While you can’t control supplier costs, you can shop around. But, comparing suppliers is a tedious and time-consuming task. Plus, supplier costs are always changing—the supplier with the lowest cost today may not have the lowest cost tomorrow. What if you could automatically determine the lowest cost supplier?

Introducing Order Analyst™—an part of Paladin’s business-building Market Driven Inventory Management™ technology. Order Analyst™ maintains current EDI supplier costs for your inventory items and can quickly compare them to determine the lowest-cost EDI supplier for purchase orders.

This article provides instruction and information on the following:

• How it works
• EDI supplier costs are maintained in your inventory item’s supplier list
• Create lowest-cost supplier purchase orders from a single purchase order

How it works

Order Analyst™ features are automatically turned on in your store. However, the lowest-cost EDI Supplier feature is only available when you have one or more of these EDI Suppliers:

• Ace Hardware
• Orgill Hardware
• True Value Hardware
• Emery Jensen Distribution (EJD)
• House Hasson

In the following feature description, the term “supported EDI suppliers” refers to these five suppliers.

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EDI supplier costs are maintained in your inventory item’s supplier list

In Paladin, during EDI processing, Order Analyst™ automatically maintains supported EDI supplier costs (when available) in your inventory item’s supplier data.

To enable this feature:

1. In Paladin, on the top ribbon, select in the Inventory module.
2. Enter a part number in the Part # box.
3. Press Enter.
4. On the bottom ribbon of the module, select F11 Suppliers.
5. In the Edit Suppliers window, two columns appear: Mkt Cost and Broken Carton. EDI processing sets these new values for supported EDI suppliers only, and they cannot be manually edited. If a supported EDI supplier is not in the table, and there is supplier cost data available for that item, EDI processing automatically adds the EDI supplier. A Mkt Cost of 0 means that there is no supplier cost data. When Order Analyst™ looks for the item’s lowest cost, it looks at non-zero Mkt Cost values in these columns.

Figure 1: Mkt Cost and Broken Carton values set by EDI 

Note: The Mkt Cost value in the Edit Suppliers window may not match the Mkt cost value on the item’s Pricing tab.

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Create lowest-cost supplier purchase orders from a single purchase order

To learn how Order Analyst™ can create purchase orders for different suppliers from a single purchase order created by any method, see Order Analyst: Create supplier POs for a suggested order or other PO in seconds. Methods include the Suggested Order Report, an RF unit ordering process, imported purchase order files, or any other process that creates a purchase order.

Figure 2: Order Analyst flow

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