Deltek Costpoint Procurement for Manufacturers: Requisitions, Standard Text, and CMI

Are you taking full advantage of all the features that Deltek Costpoint’s Procurement modules can provide to your Manufacturing business? We regularly work with clients to assess their current utilization of the procurement modules and make recommendations on how they can better utilize this powerful capability. In this multi-part article series, we will discuss some of the many Costpoint Procurement features that we want to ensure you are aware of, to help your manufacturing procurement processes run even better. Many of these apply even if you are not a manufacturing business and are just procuring goods & services.

Purchase Requisitions

You’d be amazed at how many businesses utilize Costpoint for their Purchase Orders (PO’s) but are manually entering PO’s because they are generating and routing Purchase Requisitions (PR’s) through an external non-Costpoint ticketing system or PDF form. While Costpoint still functions if you manually create PO’s and skip the Costpoint PR step, these companies are missing out on important value-added features that the PR module facilitates, thus hindering their manufacturing business from realizing Costpoint’s full potential.

Costpoint’s PR is where the procurement process is intended to begin. The PR is the request to begin sourcing. It also informs Costpoint that a supply order is in process. If you manage the request in an external system, then Costpoint is unable to effectively plan with the knowledge that a supply order is already in process, although it has not yet been converted to a PO.

Additionally, Costpoint has automated PR email approval workflows that can be tailored to various situations (i.e., quality approvals, value thresholds where additional or alternate approvers are required, etc.). The quality approval step is a very useful function for manufacturing businesses, particularly. This allows the Quality department to add quality clauses to PR lines so that the proper requirements are flowed to suppliers. They achieve this through the use of Costpoint’s Standard Text functionality. Inputting their own customized QA Provisions so that they can be associated with parts and also manually or automatically flowed to PR’s in a standardized and repetitive manner.

While PR’s can be created manually for ad hoc needs, as companies become more advanced in their utilization of Costpoint’s Advanced Manufacturing capabilities, there are multiple automated ways that PR’s can be created as well. By letting the system handle much of the mundane day-to-day planning work in an automated manner, time can be freed up for your material planners to focus their efforts on the challenging exception cases, rather than hand-keying in hundreds of PR lines.

Some of these automated Purchase Requisition generation methods are as follows:

• Inventory Reorder Report – A process that can be run against Reorder type inventory parts, where preestablished Min/Max or Reorder points are analyzed by the Inventory Module and PR’s are automatically generated against the reorder project(s) for any of the parts that have triggered their reorder point level. This was one of my favorite features when I ran the SCM department. We managed well over 200 unique SKUs tied to our manufacturing operating supplies. We’d run this report once a week, and it would generate a PR containing any items that needed to be reordered to keep stock levels within the preestablished levels. This was a significant time-saver for the inventory team.
• Generate PR’s from Sales Orders – Some businesses sell kits via Sales Orders, where the kit has a Bill of Materials and all of the parts need to be procured in support of the sale. This function can generate PR(s) directly from the Sales Order.
• MRP Planned Orders – MRP is the most advanced form of PR automation. The Material Requirements Planning (MRP) Module analyzes time-phased supply and demand, and recommends PR’s and MO’s for Buy and Make parts, respectively. When you “Firm” these planned orders, for Buy parts, PR’s will be automatically generated and immediately ready for approval routing.
• Simple Purchase Requisitions – This one is a bit unique from the others on this list. While not “Automated,” a “Simple PR” is a function Costpoint has that allows for the creation of PR templates. You can establish rules on what the user is allowed to change, what they are required to input, and so forth. A good example is a template for purchasing office supplies. That simple PR could have the project & account hard-coded, and require minimal entry of additional information by the requisitioner, since it was preestablished for commonly executed PRs. Essentially, a time-saving tool for tasks that are very repetitive.

Part Standard Text

Building on the points made in the previous section, standard text is extremely valuable in standardizing your procurement requirements. Many businesses already use Standard Text to flow their Procurement Terms & Conditions in the PO header. That is one use that I would recommend, but standard text can be used for far more. Developing standard Quality Provisions that can be associated with parts and flowed to suppliers at the PO Line Level ensures that the part is purchased exactly the same way every time, removing the need for people to look up or remember how it was purchased the previous time. I’m of the mindset that a part should always represent the same thing. If you buy it based on different requirements, then those shouldn’t be tracked as the same part number in inventory, since they are not created equal.

A lesser-known use case for part standard text is also for flowing internal facing standard text. I can flag certain standard text clauses as “internal only” and associate them with the parts that have incoming inspection criteria that I want to bring to the attention of my QA department, upon receipt. That text would be associated with the PO, but not printed on the PO. We’d see that text only on the Receipt Traveler document, an internally facing document, that communicates the internal requirement to aid the QA Incoming Inspection team. These clauses would be in addition to the QA flowdowns that were also externally facing.

Costpoint’s Content Management Integration (CMI)

Utilizing Costpoint’s Content Management Integration (CMI) allows you to attach documents (artifacts) to Costpoint records. These artifacts are stored in an external Content Management System (i.e., SharePoint), but to the Costpoint user, they appear to be housed directly in Costpoint and attached to the record.

While not specifically a Procurement function, in the procurement world, the most common use cases tend to be attachments to the PR, PO, Receipt, and PO Voucher. A great example would be attaching a copy of a quote to a PR. The requisitioner can attach the document(s) at PR generation. Subsequently, approvers and the buyer can download and view those attachments to facilitate subsequent steps in the procurement process. This removes the need to send emails to peers with these attachments. These documents are also very helpful when it comes to audits, such as a CPSR.

Unlocking the Full Potential of Costpoint Procurement

This article highlights just a few of the procurement capabilities within Deltek Costpoint that can streamline processes, improve visibility, and reduce manual effort for manufacturers. From automated requisition generation to standardized quality provisions and integrated document management, these features can deliver significant time and cost savings, but only if they’re used to their full potential.

At Redstone Government Consulting, we specialize in helping government contractors assess, implement, and optimize Costpoint modules to meet the unique needs of their business. Whether you’re looking to leverage purchase requisitions better, improve your procurement workflows, or integrate related modules like manufacturing and inventory, our team can help you get more value from the tools you already have in place. In the next article of this series, we’ll cover additional features such as reflecting purchasing commitments on PSRs, working with “Buy with component” parts on POs, and outsourcing manufacturing services through Costpoint.