Sage 100

JobOps Purchase Agent vs Sage Inventory Advisor. Can someone summarize the key differences between the two products. IA appears to factor in past sales volume and company forecast to project future requirements and Purchase Agent pulls data from the existing modules (no history, no custom forecast). Is this an accurate summary. is there more?

Just a quick note, and then I'll ponder longer the SIA questions - SIA does review sales history but it can be set to look at 12, 18 or 24 months, but that can be overridden in SIA be user defined forecasts. That's helpful when you have a new product and it doesn't have sales history to analyze.

I don't think Purchase Agent allows for any custom forecast or out of the box forecasting algorithms like SIA, so that's an advantage for SIA. The big advatage for JobOps is you are in Sage and can instantly create the PO. SIA is more of a download upload process using VI to create the PO.

I just discussed doing a formal comparison of these with Synergistic Software. They are planning to beef up the Purchase Agent product in the future. These really do represent separate focuses with some overlap. I would say every distributor could use both functions. In terms of forecasts, Purchase Agent will incorporate MRP Projected Demand data, if it is entered, but this is what it is without any special algorithms like SIA. SIA does all that cool algorithm stuff to determine what and how much to hold in inventory, and Purchase Agent tells you what and when to purchase with automated processes to cut purchase orders. I would say SIA is for the inventory control function and Purchase Agent is for the purchasing function. Again - separate focus.

I'm no expert on Purchase Agent but @JohnHoyt SIA does create POs based on the analysis and these are easily exported/imported to Sage 100 or out to Excel if you want to tweak anything and then import it. I suppose the Purchase Agent may be a bit easier for PO side since the process is automated.

I think SIA has also developed modified scripts to look at WT Lines for demand and consumption.

Another big difference is that P/A runs on a real-time basis and may be run multiple times a day, whereas with SIA you have to wait until the updates occur each night. It really depends on the operations requirements of the customer. SIA would be able to read WT lines, since they are sales order lines, but not sure if it can determine which are parent and which are component.

SIA scripts are modifiable so you can map component parts of W/T like parts of a BOM per SIA trainer I had. You can also schedule to update multiple times per day. Caveat in that my customers are not using it yet and I have no horse in this game. Real time is often preferable but not always required.

SIA can be run on demand. By default it is scheduled to run once a day but can be run as often as needed.