Handling Kimball Office, National Surcharge

Friday, July 11, 2008 — In response to soaring energy and material costs, furniture manufacturers Kimball Office and National recently announced a surcharge of 1 percent of net purchase effective with orders placed July 7, 2008.

Meanwhile, you must still create your purchase orders with the current pricing that does not include the 1 percent surcharge. If you attempt to increase your pricing, you may encounter an issue when transmitting affected purchase orders to those manufacturers.

Why? Both Kimball Office and National have “expected pricing” built into their order fulfillment systems.  The 1 percent surcharge, however, is not calculated into their systems' expected pricing matrices. Therefore, if you transmit a purchase order with the 1 percent surcharge included, the Kimball Office and National order fulfillment system will reject your purchase order due to the discrepancy with their systems' expected pricing.

How should you handle the 1 percent surcharge pricing in DDMS office furniture edition? The best way to account for the surcharge is to use Change Mode, as follows:

1. Create purchase orders to Kimball Office and National as usual in DDMS:
1. Create the ticket (sales order) in Order Entry.
2. Create the purchase order(s) from the Order Totals tab in Order Entry.
2. Transmit purchase orders as usual to Kimball Office and National via the ECi Private Supply Network (PSN):
1. Go to Purchase Order Entry.
2. In the Action Code field, select Communicate.
3. In the Vendor Type field, select Kimball or National
4. Select Purchase Order.
3. After you have received the acknowledgement, use the Change Mode of Order Entry in DDMS to modify the cost by 1 percent:

Note: It is important that you perform these steps before you receive purchase orders. Once a purchase order has been received, updating cost on the sales order will not update cost on the purchase order.

1. In Order Entry, go to the Action Code field, and select Change.
2. Enter the Ticket number attached to the purchase order for Kimball Office or National. (There is no need to limit to specific purchase orders.)
3. In the Enter Furniture Limits dialog box that appears, click OK. 
4. Once the items have displayed, go to the Order Entry drop down field and select Modify Order.
5. When the Modify Order screen appears, select the Vendors Kimball Office and/or National (all items associated with Kimball Office and/or National will be highlighted on the screen. 
6. Next, click on the arrow next to Modify and select Cost from the drop down menu.
7. Now click on Adjust and select Percentage.
8. Enter the number 1 in the Change By box. 
9. Click the Apply button.
10. Click the Update button. All costs for the selected items will then be adjusted to reflect a 1.0% increase.
11. On the Change Tab of Order Entry, click the Accept button.

If, by mistake, you do not update the cost as recommended in the steps above, you can still correct the purchase order cost through the Post PO function in Accounts Payable.

ECi continues to work closely with furniture manufacturers to ensure that the process of communicating your order data is as smooth as possible.