Hi All,
In our legacy ERP system, we had close to 30 product categories (out of the box item grouping feature) that grouped items together for various reasons (for finished goods, product line, and for component parts, categories were created for some of the parts based on functional usage).
These product categories don't share many of the attributes defined in an item class:
-stock/non-stock
-finished good/component/subassembly/service/expense/labor
-valuation method
-posting classs
-lot serial class
-base/sales/purchase units
-cycle count code
-price class
-default mark for (purchasing or production).
On top of this, the finished good items often can be used in multiple product lines.
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In Acumatica, I created item classes that corresponded with the existing product categories. Next, I added a second segment which attempted to summarize a homogenous set of items within the product category (finished goods, average costing, same posting class, default mark for, serial lot class).
Taking a step back, this attempt at finding these homogenous sets within these product categories has not faired very well (we have about 9000 items total), but I'm finding that I need to create more than a handful of these homogenous sets per product category (especially for the finished goods such as stock or nonstock, equipment or not, serialized or not). This approach results in 30 legacy product categories x 3 to 5 homogenous groups within the product category. Within these homogenous groups, there is still some differences which will need to be addressed at entry.
We have deciced to utilize the customer location to properly identify product line information to the GL (and sales accounts) so posting class is not critical for the item master.
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As an alternative approach, we could abandon the old, legacy product categores (but throw them into an attribute at the item level) and just create a much smaller set of item classes that more closely maps to shared item characteristics (as seen above).
What do you recommend and what did you do (did you group together like items that share the above characteristics or did you do something similar to the Acumatica item class training which is a hybrid (e.g. create the juice item class which has a large set of similar characteristics)?
Thanks,
Patrick
