# Auto-ordering

## What It Is

The Auto-ordering skill gives your assignments a structured methodology for converting demand forecasts into purchase orders in retail environments. It guides the assignment through a 7-gate validation pipeline — checking forecast quality, inventory position, supplier capacity, financial headroom, logistics feasibility, business policy compliance, and external market signals — before producing a final order decision for each SKU.

This is a default skill — ready to use immediately without any setup.

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## What It Can Do

### 7-Gate Validation Pipeline

The skill evaluates each order line against up to seven quality gates before approving or flagging it:

* **Gate 1 – Forecast Validation**: Checks whether the demand signal is trustworthy before any quantities are committed
* **Gate 2 – Inventory Position**: Verifies that stock levels, open purchase orders, and reorder points actually justify placing a new order
* **Gate 3 – Supplier Validation**: Confirms the supplier can fill the order within required lead times and at the right minimum order quantities
* **Gate 4 – Financial Approval**: Checks budget availability, pricing accuracy, and total order cost against financial limits
* **Gate 5 – Logistics Feasibility**: Validates that warehouse capacity, delivery schedules, and inbound slots can accommodate the order
* **Gate 6 – Business Rules**: Applies assortment policies, promotional calendars, and approval thresholds defined by your team
* **Gate 7 – External Signals**: Adjusts for weather, market conditions, or competitor activity that may warrant overriding the standard calculation

### Graceful Degradation

Every gate is optional. When a data source (supplier master data, warehouse capacity, budget files) is unavailable, the skill logs why that gate was skipped and continues to the next. An order validated through all available gates still has value — the output clearly shows which gates ran and which were skipped, so you understand the confidence level of each result.

### Order Quantity Calculation

The skill includes a standard Order-Up-To Level model to calculate order quantities from forecasts, incorporating average daily demand, review period, lead time, and safety stock (configurable by service level target: 90%, 95%, or 99%).

### Structured Output per SKU

For each order line, the skill produces a clear decision:

* **Auto-approve** — all available gates passed within tolerances
* **Adjust and approve** — one or more gates required a change (e.g., rounding to MOQ), applied automatically
* **Hold for review** — a flag exceeds auto-approval thresholds; queued for human review with full context attached

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## When to Use It

Use the Auto-ordering skill when your assignment needs to:

* **Process replenishment forecasts**: Convert a periodic demand forecast file into a validated purchase order batch
* **Automate routine reorders**: Let the assignment handle straightforward reorder decisions while escalating exceptions to buyers
* **Apply multiple validation checks in sequence**: Avoid single-gate failures that miss downstream issues (e.g., approving an order that passes financial checks but would overflow warehouse capacity)
* **Audit order decisions**: Produce a transparent record of which gates applied and why each order was approved, adjusted, or held

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## Example Tasks

* "Convert this week's demand forecast into purchase orders, skipping any suppliers we don't have master data for"
* "Process the attached replenishment file and hold anything over €50,000 for buyer review"
* "Run the weekly auto-ordering routine and post a summary of held orders to Slack"
* "Validate these 200 order lines against our budget and logistics capacity before sending to suppliers"

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## How to Use

1. Open the assignment you want to configure
2. In the assignment settings, find the Skills section
3. Select the Auto-ordering skill
4. In your assignment's SOP, describe what data sources are available (forecast file, inventory system, supplier master data) and what thresholds trigger human review
5. Optionally connect Google Sheets or Excel for the forecast input file and output order table

The skill's validation methodology and order quantity formulas are applied automatically when the assignment runs.

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## Things to Know

* This is a default skill available to all teams
* Gates are optional — the skill adapts to whatever data is available and reports what was skipped
* Orders flagged for review include all gate results and context so buyers can make informed decisions quickly
* Pairs with the Input Cost Monitor skill for checking commodity price movements before approving orders, and with Shopify or SAP S/4HANA connections for fetching live inventory and submitting approved orders