Working with the Product Management tab

The Product Management tab contains all of the screens and fields that are used for setting up and maintaining products in your system. The Product Management tab is where you describe your products in detail, classify them, establish their costs and prices, and set up vendor information. The system updates the data available from the Product Management tab when you upload an updated product CD or tape from a vendor onto your system through Vision Back Office; it also updates the data if you upload product information from an Excel spreadsheet.

Each product in your Vision system has a record that contains data such as product number and description, unit of measure, price, and cost. When a new product is added to your system, its record is created at the global product level. If the product is to be available to a particular warehouse, the global product record is copied to that warehouse. Each warehouse product record is dependent on and connected to its global product record. In fact, a warehouse product record cannot exist without a corresponding global product record.

Parts of warehouse product records can be customized for each particular warehouse, allowing each warehouse to define its own primary vendors, product costs, cost-based price calculations, graduated loads and rebates, and minimum sell units of measure. All of a warehouse's product records together make up the warehouse's product file.

Other parts of the product records — such as the product description, the product class, and the available units of measure and corresponding UPC numbers — are maintainable only at the global product level. This can save you a considerable amount of time. For example, if you need to correct a product's UPC number, you can make one change to the UPC set up in the global product record without having to change it in every warehouse product record.

Often a global product file is very large; after all, it consists of a record for every single product — of which there may be thousands, tens of thousands, or more — in your system. Therefore, not all global product records are copied to every warehouse. If a warehouse is possibly not going to sell a particular product, it may be advantageous to avoid copying its global record to that warehouse. Searching in a comparatively small warehouse product file will not take as long as searching in a global product file.

Note: To access the Product Management tab and make changes, you must have the proper security privileges. To make changes at the global product level, the Product Maint (Global) job function needs to be assigned to one of your roles. To make changes at the warehouse product level, the Product Maint (Warehouse) job function needs to be assigned to one of your roles. Roles are assigned to users in the User Maintenance on the Security Maintenance screen of the Vision Configuration tab. For more information, refer to About roles and job functions.

Following are descriptions of the screens available on the Product Management tab.

Screen name

Purpose

Product Lookup

This screen helps you quickly:

Search for a product.
Review basic information, such as the description, the stock type, the availability, and pricing information.
View the order message, if available for a product.
Find out which warehouses keep this product in stock (if you select a global product).
Initiate the creation of a new global product.
Create a new warehouse product by copying an existing global or warehouse product.

Main

This screen is where you set up and maintain basic product information such as:

Product number of the superseding product (if applicable)
Classifications such as product class and product type
Stock status
ABC code, which identifies how fast the product moves in the warehouse
Inventory replenishment settings such as reorder point, safety stock quantity, and line point
Manufacturer of the product, as well as the manufacturer's rebates and average lead time for the product
Overstock and transfer balancing options

UOM

This is the unit of measure (UOM) screen. This screen helps you quickly:

Identify a product's valid UOMs, as well as each UOM's corresponding multiple, weight, size dimensions, and UPCs.
Select the minimum sell UOM and the full-case UOM.
Identify the product's master pack quantity and UNSPSC, if applicable.

Costs/Prices

This screen is where you set up and maintain cost and price information such as:

List price, core price (if applicable), future list price, pricing class, and price level prices
Cost load percentage and future purchase order cost
Standard cost and core cost (if applicable)
Whether the product is taxable, and the appropriate tax category

Locations

This screen is where you identify the physical location of the product in your warehouse. You also identify the maximum and minimum quantities for the location.

Vendors

This screen is where you identify the vendor families that can supply the product. You also use this screen to establish the sequence, from first vendor family to last vendor family, that the system should use when electronically transmitting purchase orders if the product is a non-stock product.

Contracts

This screen is where you set up and maintain vendor contract information for a product, including price, quantities, and start and end dates.

Alternates

This is where you set up alternate and companion relationships between suitable products.

Usage

This screen identifies product usage for every month of the current year and last year. You can use this screen to override a month's usage quantity or exempt a month from usage calculations; doing so enables you to prevent an unusually high or low sales month from skewing the average monthly usage, an important quantity that helps determine when to replenish stock products.

As an alternative to setting up usage exceptions individually for products, you may want to set up ROP models for various product lines. ROP models enable you to specify settings for calculation of average monthly usage. For more information, refer to Set up or modify an average monthly usage calculation for an ROP model.

Wholesaler

This screen is where you identify the wholesaler associated with the product and applicable volume cash discount percentage.

Machines

This screen is where you quickly identify the following information if the class type of the product class is machine, accessory, or part:

Whether a serial number is required for the product
Whether the product is salvageable
Expected life span of the product
Terms of the manufacturer's warranty
Terms to schedule preventative maintenance for the product

ROP Factors

This screen is where you can set up and maintain three ROP factors for a product: the safety stock quantity, the ROP quantity, and the linepoint quantity. You can specify different quantities for different warehouses to reflect different product usage in your various warehouses.

If you have a product in your system that has not generated enough usage (that is, if few or any customer orders have been placed for this product in a particular warehouse), you may want to manually set up quantities for the ROP factors on the ROP Factors screen and set what is known as a freeze date. Before the system calculates the ROP factors for a product in a warehouse during End-of-Month processing and during on-demand ROP/EOQ recalculations, the system checks for a freeze date for the warehouse product:

If a freeze date exists and it is sometime in the future, then the system does not recalculate the ROP factors for that warehouse product; instead, it uses the quantities manually set up on the ROP Factors screen.
If a freeze date does not exist, or if the freeze date established is today or in the past, then the system continues processing with the standard calculations for the ROP factors of the product.

The ROP Factors screen is also available on the Purchasing tab.

Note: To access the ROP Factors screen, you must have the proper security privileges. Either the Product Maint (Global) job function or the Product Maint (Warehouse) job function needs to be assigned to one of your roles. Roles are assigned to users in the User Maintenance on the Security Maintenance screen of the Vision Configuration tab. For more information, refer to About roles and job functions.