Why do a Product Transfer
In Online Advantage, you may not delete a Product, or remove a Size or Colour from a Product. If we allowed the deleting then the product details would no longer be available when you ran reports on historical data. This would mean those reports would not be able to allocate the product to a correct Product Category, Division, Group etc. so the totals and sub-totals on the report would change from previous versions and essentially be misleading or incorrect.
Therefore the way to clear off unwanted products is to use the Product Transfer facility. It allows you to consolidate the historical records of one or more products as required. It can also be used to change the code allocated to a product if you ever need to do that.
An additional purpose of the Product Transfer function is to consolidate sizes and/or colours, or to transfer a previously non-sized/coloured product to a nominated size and/or colour. This is important as existing inventory levels and historical data is all preserved by the product transfer function.
How to do a Product Transfer
The products that are to be deleted (transferred) aka the ‘from’ products are set up in a list with the corresponding ‘to’ products. You can leave this list to build up over the course of a week or a month if you like. The products stay on the list until the Product Transfer function itself is launched. You can launch the Product Transfer process either manually or as an ‘End of Day’ process.
Setting up the List
There are two options to set up the list of products to transfer
- Enter these manually via the Set up Products to Transfer function
- Upload details from a file via the Upload Products to Transfer function
Note: Non-inventory products created ‘on the fly’ from Sales Order Entry are automatically added to the list as they are created.
Launching Product Transfer
You may do a Product Transfer at any time by scheduling it via the ‘Process Scheduler’. You should exercise caution when running a product transfer during business hours because:
- if there is a large list of products to transfer, the process could take several hours
- if there is a large list of products to transfer, the process may consume system resources while traversing the entire database making the system ‘slow’
- if the product transfer happens ‘between’ transactions you can end up with the transferred product still remaining on orders when it is deleted from the Product Master.
It is highly recommended that the Product Transfer be run outside of regular hours.
If you do choose to run the Product Transfer via the scheduler it will be submitted as a ‘background task’ and you will receive a notification to this effect. Once the task has finished running in the background, an email alert will be sent to your email address to let you know when it is finished.
To set up product transfer to run as an overnight ‘End of Day’ function, use the Process Scheduler and select to include it to run it at the end of either EOD, EOW or EOM.
Product Transfer Reports
The Product Transfer itself generates a short report simply to indicate that the process has run and how many ‘Product Transfer Reports’ to look for. The Product Transfer may produce up to 3 reports as follows:
List of Products Transferred
This report shows you the ‘From’ and ‘To’ details of the products that were successfully transferred via the transfer process. It will also show a list of any outstanding dockets that the product was found on and have now been updated with the new product code. The docket list includes; purchase orders, shipments, sales & transfer orders (on pick), work order production items (finished product), and work order material items (raw materials).
It might be important to pass on the details of the product code change to the appropriate departments/team members responsible for these dockets as there could well be paperwork being worked on (Picking Dockets, Work Orders) on the warehouse/factory floor with the old codes showing that could lead to time lost or problems of stock identification.
Note: The destination (To) product is updated with a Product Note about the transfer to provide an audit trail and historical lookup facility.
List of Products that could not be Transferred
This report shows you the ‘From’ and ‘To’ details of the products that could not be transferred, along with the reason(s) not transferred. As an example, if you ticked the option to not transfer products with outstanding inventory information, and the system finds some stock on hand in a inventory location then the product will not transfer. It won’t transfer until that stock on hand is zero and that is why it would be included on this report. This report can be used to follow up on products that weren’t transferred.
Products shown on this report remain in the Product Transfer List and the Product Transfer process will assess the products again next run.
Product Transfer Removed Details
This report lists products that were not transferred but also removed from the Product Transfer List as they were deemed ‘bad’. It may be that the ‘From’ and ‘To’ products did not have the same Classification e.g. transferring an add-on product to a service product. It may be that they did not have the same ‘Tracking’ method e.g. transferring a serial tracked item to a batch tracked item. There can be a number of reasons why a product will appear on this report.
For items appearing on this report, you need to set up the ‘From’ products on the Product Transfer List again with an appropriate corresponding ‘To’ product so that the next product transfer can attempt the changes again.
Reprinting Reports
These 3 reports are available on the menu for reprinting. Note however that they will only reprint the details of the ‘last’ Product Transfer attempt. You cannot go back and reprint the details of any previous product transfer run prior to the last one. For this reason, if you think you may need a history of product transfer reports, you should archive these reports in some manner for future reference.
Choosing Output Destination for the Reports
You can choose the output destination for the reports by setting up a default destination in the Standard Special Form Queue function for Product Transfer (PTFR) with the required printer or email address destination. This will be the destination for the reports regardless of whether you invoke the Product Transfer function via the menu or schedule it as an overnight process. All 3 reports will be sent to the same destination. Note: there is no facility to send individual reports to different destinations.