The Enterprise Material Transfer (EMT) module lets you automatically translate sales orders and material orders into purchase orders. You use EDI ECommerce to exchange purchase orders, change documents, and shipping documents in electronic data interchange (EDI) format with your suppliers.

Much EMT processing is automatic. For example, when you change the order quantity of an MO item, the system automatically updates the purchase order and generates an EDI document to inform the supplier. When a supplier picks or ships the items, the supplier’s system automatically generates a status change message indicating that you can no longer make changes to the MO line.

See QAD Sales User Guide for more information on EMT.

Most of the features of EMT are the same regardless of whether you are using sales orders or material orders. However, there is one important difference. Sales orders for EMT items let you specify two shipment types:

EMT MOs offer only one shipping option: transshipment. The supplier ships the EMT items to the ordering site. It is then your responsibility to transfer them to their final destination.

Depending on your relationship with an EMT supplier, you can reserve inventory in the supplier’s database to fill your MO. This is called direct allocation. For this feature to work, you must meet a number of conditions:

To directly allocate an MO line item, change the default item site to the site established for the connected database. The system then creates a special, preliminary allocation in the supplier’s application database. When you export the EMT purchase order and your supplier imports it as a confirmed sales order, the supplier’s system automatically converts the preliminary allocation to a general allocation for the secondary sales order.

See QAD Sales User Guide for information on setting up direct allocations.