Bakery Sales Order Processing

Ceres Bakery Sales Order Processing, allows you to receive and collate orders from any source for each day of the week and for many weeks in advance. Telephone orders can be keyed directly into the computer at normal conversation speed.

Customers orders vary for different days of the week, order amendments can be made at any time, temporarily or permanently. Cumulative totals and sub-totals are constantly maintained for each product and displayed or printed for production runs, despatch and sales planning. The system can handle wholesale or shop orders and important procedures like van reconciliation’s and weekly shop settlements are compiled automatically.

Ceres computes mixing batch requirements based on the latest amended orders and yields. Allowance can be made for goods to and from the deep freeze, retarded or good stock. Totals may be converted to trays and racks depending on your needs.

Printouts of delivery notes in predefined sequences together with total summaries of each product range can be provided as often as necessary. At the packing stage, ‘shorts’ and overs marked on delivery notes can be entered on the computer. Weekly or daily invoicing automatically updates all appropriate ledgers.

Forward orders which have been keyed into the special forward orders file will take precedence over base week data on an individual product bases.

In this way if the base week contains a standing order for 20 Jam Swiss Rolls but the customer has placed a forward order for 15 Jam Swiss roll in week ten. When generating week ten, the week generate procedure will first copy the standing order from the base week into the new week ten. The program will then processes the forward orders file replacing the order for 20 with the order for 15.

All totals will be automatically adjusted, the record containing the forward order is marked as having been processed and will be removed by the housekeeping program.

As Sales Order Processing is fully integrated with and dependant on the sales ledger, orders cannot be processed for Non sales ledger customers.

In the case of own shops who strictly speaking are not sales ledger customers, special provisions have been made so that there orders can be processed in the normal way.

As the system is designed to process orders from known customers of known products, customer details must have been entered into the customer file and product details entered into the product file. In addition to processing orders for known products, facilities are provided to enter and charge none product file items to known customers. Full details of this feature are contained in section 122.

Facilities are provided for the inclusion of celebration cakes to known customers. Full details of this feature and also the charging of celebration cakes or other goods to non sales ledger customers are contained in section 123.

Various programs are provided to accommodate different methods of entry, whether the order is being called over the telephone, is for one or multiple days, whether it is a complete order or amendments only.

Appropriate Day, week/year are entered, customers existing order for the specified day may be viewed, amended, or products added or deleted. The whole order need not be viewed as a Go-to command is provided.

Appropriate week/year is entered customers existing order for the complete week is displayed and may be amended, as required for all days in the week.

Where customers wish to replace their entire daily order with a new order, an appropriate program is provided which enables the operator to remove the old order then process the new order as it is being called over the telephone by the customer.

Keying mistakes can happen, this can be simply pressing the wrong button, or wrong interpretation of a written or spoken order.

Order fluctuation will trap many of these errors, by detecting that the order as entered varies from the order that the system expects by more than the tolerance for that customer for that product.

A warning will be given, the operator may override this warning and accept the quantity as keyed.

See Order Fluctuation Concepts for more details on this feature.

Not all products are available on every day of the week. This feature allows you to define which products are available on which day.

The system will warn if a product is ordered but is not available on that particular day. This warning may be overridden by the operator.

Automatic routines are available to remove products from customers orders where availability has been changed.

See Product Availability Concepts for more details on this feature.

Certain products may be restricted to certain customers, this allows in addition to own label operation, test marketing, own shops special lines to be accommodated.

See Product Restriction Concepts for more details on this feature.

As each order is entered or amendment is made a special orders audit log is updated with details of the amendment, the time the amendment was entered, and which terminal entered the amendment.

This orders log will typically hold all entries for the past seven days.

The ability to quickly and easily search the entire order database displaying or printing the results of the search by individual customer and total.

Display or print of any of the automatically maintained totals, Grand Totals, Route Totals, Production Sub-total 1 or Production Sub-total 2. All days in the selected week are shown. Selective criteria such as product type or reference number range may be entered for selective displays.

The Orders Audit Log can be selectively interrogated to print reports on amendments processed for specified days in specific weeks for individual or ranges of products.

The ability to access such information will provide the answer to queries that might otherwise remain a mystery.

A full and comprehensive range of reports is provided, each report is fully described in the appropriate reports section together with information on how you or system tailoring can effect the contents.

Different layouts and formats are available, details printed will vary according to the way in which the customer is set-up.

Delivery notes may be printed showing all the customers products, or products selected according to product type, where packing is carried out in distinct areas using the delivery note as the packing document.

Two opportunities are provided for the printing of messages. At the base of the every delivery note the system will print a company message. In addition the facility is provided for a single line message which is customer specific.

Where packing is carried out in distinct locations and you wish to send customers a single delivery note containing all products rather than multiple delivery notes by product packing area. You can print picking notes in a similar format to delivery notes for packing purposes only.

Picking notes are also useful where orders are preassembled then stored, as say in the case of Fresh Cream lines which have to be stored under refrigerated conditions. The picking note would remain with the goods for recognition purposes.

Where packing or order assembly is carried out on a product basis, this report which shows orders for a single product for multiple customers is available.

Mixing sheets may be printed using either the Grand Total or any of the automatically maintained Route or Production sub-totals.

The format of these reports include the total order for all the products made from each dough, converted to mixes.

Allowance is made for amendment to totals to take into account stock or retarder/deep-freeze stock movements.

See Mix Numbering Concepts for further details on this subject.

Works in the same way as Mixing Sheets, but takes the categorisation of products one step further in that like products are added together to give more detailed production information.

See Mix Numbering Concepts for further details on this subject.

Invoicing, may be weekly or daily based. Some customers can be daily while the majority are weekly invoiced, or visa versa.

Invoicing can be accomplished in separate runs where there is a need to produce some invoices while all details are not ready for the complete run.

Copy Invoices can be printed for as long as the data remains on the disk in the Invoice Archive

See Invoicing Concepts for further details on this subject.

The Order Processing module also processes all credits. Credits in the same way as orders are definable and controllable by customer, by product.

At entry time the operator specifies the reason for the credit, an analysis of all credits and reasons is available on a weekly basis.

Two of the credit reasons are “Date Controlled” in that you can say the latest date on which a particular customer can receive a credit for that reason. This feature is useful where Sale or Return is to be allowed for a limited time only.

For charging purposes credits can either be included in the customers weekly invoices to provide a net invoice, or a completely separate credit note which is considered as a separate financial transaction, can be produced.

See Credits Concepts for further details on this subject.

When invoices and credits are posted to the sales ledger a special set of bakery files are automatically updated. These files are week based, unlike the Sales Ledger file which are month or period based

You may select on an individual customer basis whether and how the customers sales are to be recorded, individually or by customer group. Reports specific to the way in which the baking industry trades are produced to enable you to operate the correct level of control on your business.

Operate using the same logic as Sales Analysis 1. Sales Analysis 2 allows you to define your product file using different criteria. This might be useful either for providing details to a customer who uses different criteria than those you chose to use in Sales Analysis “1”. Or to provide you with less or greater sales analysis details. You may select on an individual customer basis whether and how the customers sales are to be recorded, individually or by customer group.

Unlike Sales Analysis “1” and Sales Analysis“2” where you choose how you wish to define the criteria for analysing your product file, Sales Analysis“3” uses the product discount groups as the source of the split of sales. As with Sales Analysis “1” & “2” you may select for which customers you wish to record this information individually.

Example

Sales Analysis One might be defined into different product types breaking down both bread and confectionery into say 12 different types.

Sales analysis Two might be defined to break the product file into two types say Bread and Non Bread.

Sales analysis Three would simply break the product file down as defined by product discount group.

How you wish to define your sales analysis will depend on the sales emphasis of your business.