I have a product which has sale input of KG as unit of measurement.
The output of the product can be in Cans, Drums, KG or bottles.
Pls advise should i create multiple product of the same item with different units of measurement or
create 1 product with multiple unit of measurement.
I would argue if it is stocked in inventory in a different base unit of measure it is ultimately a different item number. But I am aware of business exceptions and requirements for breaking this, but for me, it would be independent items. The customer may order 10KG, but that is one Drum, or five cans or 20 bottles, and I would want visibility of how many bottles I have, so it would be a different code for me.
I agree with item, this it totally up to your company. If you do different items, you may run the risk of thinking you don’t have any in stock. If you do one item and have customers who only buy in certain units of measure you may promise something you don’t have. Both ways are equally acceptable and have their own draw backs.
i agree both ways are acceptable.
There maybe serveral orders for the same products with different packaging.
But there is only 1 production process for the product.
Thats a dilemma for me!
This is a common business dilemma , not really a Navision issue.
FOr me it generally comes down to what you can deliver to the customer. f the customer asks for bottles, is there any difference if you send them drums instead? If your clients only accept one UOM then multiple items, but if they don’t mind how its packaged then one item multiple UOMs.
Pricing also comes into it, where say the cost of a bottle is negligible, but (lets say) drums are expensive.
I think it has a lot to do with how the products goes from the bottles into the drums. If you need to do anything to ‘transform’ the items that you purchase into the items that you sell, then you are basically ‘manufacturing’ and you would use kitting, or assembly or actual manufacturing. In that case, there’s an argument to have multiple items.
If the item itself is essentially the same, say you have EACH, wrapped a DOZEN into plastic, 6 of which are put into a BOX, and 125 of those go onto a PALLET. Do you really want to have different items for those? I think that would be a candidate for having one base UOM (EACH) and you have additional units of measure to use in transactions. You can then set up a purchase UOM, say if you always purchase those by the PALLET, but you usually sell them by the DOZEN. That’s easy to set up, and the pickers in the warehouse will take care of taking the items out of the packaging when orders are picked.