Is there any guidlines to identify the item hierarchy?
For example an item is 20GB external hard disk manufacturerd by seagate. So I am specifying hard disk as item. 20 GB as item variant and manufcturer code as ‘seagate’. Product group code is ‘external’. Is this way is correct in a computer equipment and parts trading company database (a sample database)?Also I am specifying inventory posting groups and product posting groups(RETAIL, say) for the items.
Alternatively, If i create an item as ‘Seagate 20GB HDD External’ and attach it to inventory posting group 'HDD" and product posting group ‘RETAIL’.And not specifying any category code or product group code.
Which approach is better?
Can we identify 20GB HDD and 40GB HDD as separate items, or variants of the same item?
I would like to know the concepts of identifying the hierarchy and identifying variants.
I would prefer, as you sell and purchase these separately, that they were distinct item numbers. This allows easier visibility in sales and purchasing, and clear traceability elements. This is how the computer based distributors I have worked with have alwasy specified the items. So the second approach, although the product posting is also done as HDD to capture sales in the GL in this manner, as well as seeing inventory categorised likewise. The manufacturer code would still be Seagate, and there may even be dimensions involved. [:D]
My personal approach is the latter of yours, but each to his own.
In your case I would use separate items, since it will be easy to user find items. In general I only use variants to distinguish tiny variations in same item for example colors.
for the above scenario (computer trading), i am proceeding with items, inventory posting group and product posting group. Here both posting groups will be very detailed .I am not going to use variant, item category and product group.
Is there any document which describes how to determine item hierarchy? I mean, how to determine item category and product group?
I don’t know the existence of such document. I even doubt there is. What you are asking is related to much to company business model. In all implementations that I know customers choose a different path in that matter.
What you need to do is play around with Item Category and product groups, and see how it affects posted documents, where things are posted when you use those. I think you could use those attributes to group and/or categorize Items. You could create an Item Category “HDD”, create different Items for all different Hard disks, and assign all of them to the HDD category.
The details of how this works is probably in the Inventory manual, which you can download from partnersource/customersource.