Item Master Data
Regardless of whether you are an importer or distributor who distributes finished products, or you are a manufacturing company that produces finished products, or you are a construction company that uses various goods and materials in its work, your goal is the same – to efficiently manage your product flows.
If you want to effectively manage the placement of goods and to manage and monitor your goods flows then you need to have organized and defined item master data. Defining item master data is a complex job that involves adding to each item different sets of data that define that item.
This primarily includes the grouping of articles, and the assignment of sets of data to each article, including the article code, full name and abbreviated name of the article, groups for posting articles, logistics data on articles and storage conditions for each article, dimensions of articles, packaging method of each article.
It is also necessary to define the method of stacking on the cargo medium (pallet, crate, crate, bag, barrel…), the method of leaving the warehouse (FIFO, FEFO, LIFO), the unit of measure for each item, the method of monitoring and the method of registration of raw materials, semi-finished products, unfinished products and finished products.
You should also add data related to stocks for each item, such as critical stock for replenishment and ordering, safety stock, stock turnover ratio, ABC status of the item. Also, the ERP warehouse of first appearance (origin) and cost center are defined for each item.
These are just some of the data that must be defined for each article. If you don’t have defined item master data, you can expect some problems in almost all links of the supply chain.
You may experience some of the following problems:
Inaccurate inventories and discrepancies between book and actual inventory levels.
Stoppages in production or distribution.
Bottlenecks in storage and production.
Out of stock (the item that customers need or that is necessary in production is not in stock).
Penalties from Key account customers due to out of stock.
Customer dissatisfaction that can affect cash flow.
Worse sell-out and worse cash flow.
We can solve and prevent all these problems. We have 20 years of experience working with items and assortments and have helped many companies avoid these problems by working on item master data.
Contact us.