Adding A New Manufacturer Line

Overview

In this KB we will review the process one would take to start carrying a new manufacturer. This same process can be utilized if you are new to the software and may have imported data from another system. In this case not all steps may be necessary.

Definitions

• Manufacturer: The manufacturer is the company that makes the material you are selling. The manufacturer is just a designation so that you can have the same part number more than once in the software and differentiate between them by the manufacturer. The manufacturer is NOT who you buy the material from, though in most cases they are the same person.

• Vendor: The vendor is the company that you purchase the products from. Vendors are what is used in purchasing, receiving, AP, etc. If the manufacturer and the vendor are the same company you can just name them both the same.

• Inventory Group: We have two types of inventory groups, static and dynamic.

  • Static: A static group is just a list of items that are manually managed by a user.

  • Dynamic: Dynamic groups can either be a parameterized or non-parameterized group. They are called dynamic because the members of the group dynamically change as inventory items are either added or updated in the inventory file.

    • Parameterized: A group where the input values are specified when the group is used not when the group is first created.

    • Non-parameterized: A group where you enter the input values at the time of creating the group and they do not change.

• Pricing Profile: Savance Enterprise pricing relies on what are called pricing profiles. You can set up an unlimited number of profiles based on any number of pricing concepts. For example perhaps you want to set up profiles for a group of items that share the same criteria (Fuses, Breakers, Wire etc) or a profile for each manufacturer or a profile for each type of pricing model you use (Cost + 10%, Cost + 20% etc.). The profile is a way to manage the 6 column prices of an item based on any number of criteria. Every item must have a pricing profile assigned to it. If an item is created and no pricing profile is specified it is automatically assigned to the system ‘Default Pricing Profile’ which you are able to edit to ensure that all items are priced in some controlled manner.

• Item Template: The item template allows the user an automated way to assign certain attributes to new items that are created in the system . For instance if the new price file you get from a manufacturer has 15 new items not yet in your system, you can specify via a new item rule (discussed below) that all items of a certain type get an assigned Item template. This item template can then specify things like adding a manufacturer prefix to the beginning of the manufacturer catalogue number and removing the control digit from the UPC. Most importantly the item template specifies what pricing profile will be assigned to that item and as is discussed above, the pricing profile sets the sell prices for an item.

• New Item Rule: New Item Rules are the criteria used to determine what Item Template to apply when a new item is created in the system. As the name states, it’s only for New items, not existing items meaning it’s only applied when the new item is created. You are able to have more than one New Item Rule that could apply to the same item. In that case we leverage a priority to determine which rule to apply. For example, if you had an all encompassing rule for all of one manufacturer but then you had other more specific rules within that manufacturer to target certain groups of items, you would set the all encompassing rules priority lower than the specific items rule so the all encompassing rule is only used when no specific rule exists for that new item.

Create a New Manufacturer, Vendor and Link the Two

Creating the Manufacturer

• Purchasing => Manage Manufacturers

• Select ‘New’

• Fill out the appropriate information as seen below

Creating the Vendor

• In the Manufacturer Management screen click on the ‘New Vendor’ button

• Fill out the appropriate information as seen below and click ‘Save’. Keep in mind that in most cases the Vendor is the same as the Manufacturer. If they are not and the Vendor already exists you can skip this step.

Keep in mind that this is just the base vendor information that is required to create a vendor. If you would like to add additional vendor information to this vendor you can do so through the Vendor Management screen which is accessible via the Purchasing => Manage Vendors menu.

Linking and Saving the Manufacturer

• Once you have added the vendor you will notice that the vendor is not automatically added as a Default Associated Vendor back on the Manufacturer Management screen.

• Click the ‘Set as Default’ button and then click the ‘Save’ button to complete the creation of the Manufacturer

  

Create a Pricing Profile (If needed)

• Depending on your company policy on pricing you may need to create a new pricing profile for this new manufacturer. If that is the case then follow the steps below. Keep in mind that pricing is a complicated topic. The steps below are just showing the basic setup of pricing.

• Inventory => Pricing Manager

  

• Click on the ‘Pricing Rules Manager’ button

• Now click on the ‘Profile’ tab as seen below

• In the grid area at the bottom half of the profile tab right click your mouse and select the ‘Add Item’ menu

• This will add a new row to the grid where you can fill out the pricing information you desire.

  • Give the profile a name

• Set the Column level price formulas

• Set the Cval values (these are used within the formulas in this example to multiply the cost field by the cval 1-6 value depending on which column you are looking at. Column 1 correlates to Cval1, column 2 correlates to Cval2, etc.)

• Once you are complete you will now click on the ‘Process’ button to create this new profile

Create a New Item Template

• Inventory => Inventory Manager

• Click on the ‘Item Manager’ button

• Click on the ‘New’ button

• Select ‘Inventory’ and then click ‘Next’

• Select ‘Item Template’ and click ‘Next’

• For the Part Number, put the name of the item template, select the MFG Short this is for, it will automatically select the default vendor we set up earlier, click ‘Next’

• Fill out any other values that you would like to have set automatically when new items for this manufacturer are created and click ‘Next’

• By default the system will apply the ‘Default System Profile’ for pricing. In this example we will change that to the ‘JPA_Pricing’ profile we created earlier

• Right click on the row where it says ‘Default System Profile’ and select ‘Set Pricing Profile’

• This will launch a search screen as seen below. Type the name of the pricing profile you wish to use and click the green checkbox

• The Default System Profile should now be replaced with ‘JPA_Pricing’

• Click ‘Next’

• At this point you can click ‘Finish’ if you like. Remember that what you are creating is a set of defaults to get applied to each new item that fits the criteria we will discuss in the next section called the ‘New Item Rule’. Most people only assign the Default Vendor and the pricing but you can select from any of the displayed fields and set a value in those as well.

Create a New Item Rule

• Inventory => Inventory Manager

• Click on the ‘New Items Rules Manager’ button

• At the bottom left hand corner of the screen click on the ‘Add Rule’ button

• This should add a new row to the grid with the cursor in the ‘Manufacturer’ column. This is where you will select the JPA manufacturer that we created earlier. Click the arrow as shown below.

• Search for the manufacturer we created and select it

• After selecting the manufacturer we will now select the ‘Inventory Group’. The system comes with a set of predefined parameterized inventory groups. You can also create your own groups. For this example I will be using the predefined group called ‘MFG Code ()’. Click the arrow next to the group and scroll to ‘MFG Code ()’ and select it.

• Once you click on the arrow the below screen will appear. You will type in the MFG Short code that we assigned earlier and click the ‘Accept’ button. This will return the selected data to the grid.

• Now we will need to select the ‘Template Part Number’ to use. We will select the template we created earlier. Click on the … button to launch the search.

• Type in some or all of the item template name and hit enter. This will search for the template. Once found select it from the list and click the ‘Ok’ button as shown below.

• Lastly you can assign a priority and a description (not required). The priority will be used if there are more than one New Item Rule that could be used for an item. At that point it would select the item with the highest priority where 1 is higher than 5 for instance.

• Once complete, click the ‘Save’ button at the lower right hand corner of the screen.

Import Inventory Items

• With all the previous tasks complete all that is left is to import the new items into the system. This can be done by accessing the import wizard and running through the steps of importing items into the system.

• Admin => Import => Inventory Import

• This will launch the ‘Inventory/Pricing Import’ wizard. Click on the … next to the Source File box.

• This will launch the file navigation window. Find your file, pay close attention to the file extension that you are searching for. The default is xlsx. If you have a different type of file select it from the dropdown and then navigate to your file. When complete click on the ‘Open’ button.

• Here is what my files look like when opened in excel.

• Once you have selected your file you will now navigate down to the Inventory row and check the box. This will allow you to click on the plus sign to expand and start mapping your columns.

• Click on the … next to the Part Number row to set the field from the xlsx file to map to the Part Number in the system. On the screen that opens you will click on the arrow next to the ‘Import Fields’ box and then double click on the ‘PartNumber’ field to tell the system to look at that column name from the xlsx file. On the right you will see that field appear and a Value box next to it appear. You can type a sample value in that box and then click on the ‘Test’ button to see if there will be any issues mapping this field.

  

• After a successful test click ‘Ok’.

• This will return you back to the mapping screen where you can continue to map all of the other fields from the xlsx file to the fields in the inventory record.

• For the MFG field I choose to hard code that to ‘JPA’ by typing it in as seen below. This means that every row in the xlsx file will have it’s MFG field set to this value rather than reading it from the file.

• Continue setting all of the values and when done your screen should look something like the one below.

• Now that you are done with the mapping you will give the import a name, specify a comment, and click on the ‘Process’ button to start the import process.

• After clicking ‘Process’ you should see a message popup asking if you would like to save the ‘template’. In this example we are not creating an import template so just select ‘No’.

• You should now see the below message telling you that your import has been queued.

• Now we will navigate to the ‘Import History’ menu in order to track the progress of our import.

• With the ‘Imports History’ screen open you will see that the import has already started processing.

• Once the import is complete your history screen should look something like the image below.

  

• Click on the ‘Action Required’ link to open the ‘Import Results’ screen where we will be able to commit the results if nothing looks inaccurate. This screen will show you the old data for each part and new data if applicable. Up until this point we have not imported any data into the live inventory file.

• Notice that we see that the item template under ‘Template PartNumber’ is in fact the one we created earlier in this article.

• Now if everything looks good you can check the ‘Process’ checkboxes (which are checked by default) and then click on the ‘Commit’ button at the bottom right of the screen.

• At this point you should see a box to confirm the import. Click yes.

• Similarly to when we started the import we will see a message that says the import has again been queued. However this time it’s going to be committing the changes to the inventory table. Click Ok.

• We can again return to the ‘Imports History’ screen and monitor the progress as shown below.

• Now that the import has finished processing we will go and check the system and make sure that the new items were correctly built. Launch the inventory search and search for the items as shown below.

• Open one of the items and you will see that the ‘New Item Rule’ was applied, in turn, the correct ‘New Item Template’ that we created earlier was applied which set the MFG, Default Vendor, and the pricing profile called JPA_Pricing as seen below.

Conclusion

This concludes our simple example of how to set up and import a new manufacturer line. This is a complicated topic and we have only covered the basics. If you find yourself needing further assistance please do not hesitate to contact your sales representative to set up a consultation on how to best structure this process specific to your business.