Proactive, Collaborative Inventory Management

Your demand planning system can help you estimate how much of each material you will need to make enough products to meet your sales plan. For example, if you’re a cookie manufacturer, you’d need to figure out how many cookies you aim to sell in a particular quarter and then calculate how much butter, flour, sugar, eggs, etc. you’d need to produce enough cookies to meet that plan.

Where Supply Chain Collaboration comes in is when you need to communicate future requirements to your suppliers so that you know they can deliver. Supply Chain Collaboration helps you with that supplier connection and communication component, which is often missing from most demand planning systems.

Warehouse management systems help you manage inventory levels of day-to-day direct and MRO consumables in your plants. They’re important to daily operations, but communicating with suppliers is often a cumbersome, manual process. Suppliers lack visibility into inventory levels and require a PO to take any action, even if they have a multi-year contract.

Inventory Collaboration gives buyers and suppliers visibility across warehouses to monitor minimum and maximum levels to avoid these manual processing challenges. It increases supplier productivity and automates workflows to improve responsiveness to sudden increases in demand.

Coupa receives demand, inventory, and minimum/maximum signals from the ERP or WMS and shares this data with suppliers through the Coupa Supplier Portal. This allows suppliers to see real-time stock levels and receive automatic notifications about items that need restocking.

Suppliers then ship the goods and update the purchase order (PO) to an advanced shipment notice, informing customers about the expected arrival of the stock. AI insights are also provided to help suppliers optimize inventory management and reduce costs.

Both suppliers and buyers have full visibility into their shipments, promoting collaboration at each step. Goods receipt occurs in the WMS, and a copy is brought into Coupa. Invoice matching and reconciliation take place in Coupa, and payments can be made in Coupa or through the ERP, with this part of the process remaining the same for PO collaboration and forecast collaboration.