Products
- Peter Schöll
A well-maintained product master is important in order to be able to use Scopevisio's work aids and automation.
In particular, it is important to ensure that products can be found quickly and easily by everyone involved in the company in order to increase clarity and therefore speed.
It happens time and again that products that are not quickly and clearly identified are created as new products. This creates uncertainty in the company and prevents the optimization of stock levels and processes.
The designation of products in particular should be organized consistently. If we can provide support here, please contact us.
Product card
We have revised the product card, i.e. the view of the individual product.
We currently had a large number of regular plus user-defined fields on one product, on one card, without structure and without conceptual assignment.
In our experience, this often led to inconsistencies and effort to consistently fill, update and process fields.
We have therefore created a structure using tabs, which are already used in other forms. The General and Sales tabs bring exactly this structure to the product card view. We have distributed the individual information fields to the tabs in the appropriate context.
Create products
Select Products → Product management.
The Load standard products and import function should not be used when the Procurement license is activated!
To migrate from a previous system or structured data, we recommend using the import function in Scopevisio OpenScope → Import Export → Import procurement data, as additional data such as suppliers, supplier prices, reorder points, units and warehouse/storage locations can also be imported here. We recommend planning and carrying out the migration of data from previous systems with Scopevisio consultants.
To add a new product manually, select Add.
A form with four tabs appears:
General
Sales
Purchasing
Stock.
1. general
Add your product and, if you wish, assign it to a product group.
We have described further details here
Overall, we work with very few mandatory fields to make the process as fast as possible. Our idea is that the question of how much a product costs at supplier B cannot hinder sales. This information can be added later.
1.1 Units
We can manage several units for a product. This provides a clear overview of stocks, issues and receipts without having to check several products and possibly rewrite stocks or orders.
The majority of products can be fully mapped with the unit piece.
For all others, we have the following options:
Specify a base unit for the product:
this is the unit that your entire company, or organization, works with, which is meaningful enough for the vast majority of employees. Example: Beverage bottles can be the base unit in the beverage trade, in the beverage wholesale trade we would rather see a beverage crate or beverage carton as the base unit.
The system of the base unit opens up many possibilities for transparently centering stocks, orders and purchase orders on one product, which can have different units. On the one hand, this increases the clarity of which product unit we want to manage in quotations, orders, etc. and is also regularly faster here, as the question of which is the right product is no longer necessary.
In principle, a product must be created in its smallest common unit; this value is defined as the base unit.
Note: The base unit is assigned once per product and cannot be changed afterwards. We therefore recommend that you make use of our support when selecting the base units.
A base unit must be explicitly assigned.
You can define different delivery units from the base units and reference these in the data records of the product suppliers. Example: You sell a product in pieces, but receive a different price from supplier A for ordering a pallet than for the piece - then the pallet can be a delivery unit. The factor for converting how many pieces are on a pallet can be specified for each product on the General tab. Several delivery units can be referenced per product.
In addition, we can define a sub-unit that is one level below the base unit. This setting is useful for your MRP and can provide clarity, especially when it comes to the question of which unit I want to keep the product in a bill of materials and thus consume this unit.
Base units, delivery units and sub-units can be assigned via the unit matrix on the product.
Creation of new units:
In the overview of products, the "Units" entry can be found on the top right-hand side under the 'Further actions' menu:
All entries that are active here can be assigned to a product as an entry in the unit matrix so that it speaks for you in the company. We can set any relationship between units in the entries. Conversions from liquid to solid substances are possible, as shown here in the example.
1.2 Material groups
Material groups are used to simplify data maintenance. You can find out more about this in this article.
2. Sales
Under this tab you enter product information relevant to sales: Sales prices, tax rates, revenue accounts and more.
For example, you can create different revenue accounts and tax items for domestic deliveries, deliveries to a third country or intra-Community deliveries.
These details are important for invoicing.
On the Sales tab, you can also store translations for text modules if you are delivering to another language area.
3. Purchasing
In the Purchasing tab, you enter data relevant to purchasing.
The entries in the Product suppliers business object are important. Add your suppliers, prices, delivery times and any different delivery units for the product in question here. It makes sense to mark a standard supplier in order to assign your order proposals and subsequent orders to this supplier.
The selection of the standard supplier is based on your experience, price and delivery conditions. A supplier to whom you guarantee exclusivity must also be marked as a standard supplier. This also allows us to set a specific unit for the reference of the order proposals, for example the price for the purchase of an entire pallet, if we qualify this entry as a standard supplier, the unit is also written as such, i.e. we systematically ensure that we execute the order on the pallet.
It may be necessary to transport the manufacturer information for certain products in addition to the supplier information, so we can specify a manufacturer other than the supplier. To do this, we can set the Manufacturer characteristic in the same view. The manufacturer is also a contact in the contact sense, only the entry on the product supplier makes this a manufacturer.
The reference to delivery units can be set here, the supplier's product number, purchase prices and the delivery time in days can be set.
The supplier's product number can be shown as such on the order, thus ensuring that we order the defined product from the supplier.
Deviating GTIN/EAN is used to display delivery units such as other GTIN/EAN details that differ in the product. Different validity periods can be stored so that orders can always be issued with the correct price, but at the same time prices can be historicized.
Note: The supplier must be created in your contact management in order to be able to use it here.
The delivery unit of the product must first be created via the unit management and can only then be assigned.
The standard supplier entry is always valid for an unlimited period of time.
4. Stock
The Stock tab of a individual product gives you an overview of the stock development of the product in question. You can freely select the time period over which you would like to see a stock or the stock trend. You manage your stocks by location or storage location. The default storage location is My warehouse, but you can create any other warehouse.
4.1 Storage location
Storage bins can be defined under each location and each warehouse; these can be assigned to products. This allows a product to be managed in defined storage bins, one of which is to be qualified as the standard storage bin.
In goods receipt, this information appears on the goods receipt line in order to control the receipt directly to the storage bin. This means that an organizational solution must be found to ensure that goods receipts are brought to the storage bin within a certain time so that they are available for picking. Storage bins can carry minimum and maximum stock levels as an alternative to the location. This allows us to map that, for example, only a certain capacity of a certain product should be stored in a certain storage bin.
Manual booking in and booking out
Select Product stock postings to manually post the stock at your storage location. Here too, the supplier must have already been created in Contact Management in advance. However, goods movements are also posted automatically with the picking or delivery/goods receipt functions.
Use Insert to create a new entry in the overview and land on the input screen:
Mandatory fields are Product and Storage location, all other required functions are taken from Product.
This supports you in the workflow to book one or more products into the stock or to book them out. Entries are created as a line in the lower segment and written to the stock and the stock journal with the Post command.
This function is primarily intended to map ad hoc events, i.e. not as a replacement for the standard process I order products, they are delivered and I receive an invoice for them.
4.2 Stock limits
Under stock limits , you enter a minimum stock level, a reorder level and a maximum stock level for a product in the corresponding location or even at the individual storage bin. This allows us to stock a product differently in different locations or storage locations.
The levels of requirements determination cannot be combined.
This information is important for calculating order proposals. If the reorder point is not reached, the system will suggest that you reorder the difference between the actual stock and the maximum stock. Added to this are the quantities that result from the fulfillment of existing orders.
The maximum stock level is defined as the maximum stock you can hold of a product. This can lead to the maximum stock level being temporarily exceeded if demand is calculated from orders.
If you can or want to allow this, the corresponding settings can be found in the Procurement settings master data menu.
If no stock limits are defined, an order proposal is only generated for the quantities that result as requirements from orders.
Procurement settings:
We will be happy to advise you on the individual setup of your instance.
4.3 Storage bins
Each product can be assigned a fixed storage bin, warehouse or location. This entry makes sense if you want to work with fixed storage bins. The storage bin details then appear when the goods are received in the goods receipt and when the goods are moved to the corresponding storage bins.
Create products via product rules
Product rules are rules that we can apply to the manual creation of products.
From the product overview, the rules for the manual creation of products can be found under the 3 points of the other functions.
The rules can be opened here with Product new to open the product card:
Assign next SKU number
Base unit
Material group (thus the corresponding posting accounts)
Sub-unit
This information can be used from the offer, order and requirement report via the text content of a previously undefined product item in order to write the information into the product via the command: "New product".
Designation,
purchase price,
margin,
sales unit
All content is written to the product card using several rules and can then be visually checked or changed. Always check the result of the entries for completeness and plausibility. The new product is created and saved with the "Save" command.
With this system, we reduce the content to be entered to a minimum so that the manual product creation process can be completed more quickly overall. We can also ensure that certain fields are filled consistently.
Importing products
Via Openscope/Import & Export you can use the Import procurement data command to import
command to write products with reference to product groups, product suppliers and units via csv import. This option is ideal for the initial setup or for a large number of products that need to be changed.
If you would like our support here, please contact us.
Product ID
In Scopevisio, products are managed with a product ID. This is the number that always leads to the same product for you in the company. This product ID can be preset as a consecutive number so that the next number is simply suggested when the product is created.
In our opinion, this must be and remain unique.
If this is not suitable for your application, we can use multiple product IDs in the options.
This system should be selected with caution and does not utilize the potential of procurement.