Key Terms

Purchase Order (PO)

PO is a commercial document and first official offer issued by a buyer to a seller, indicating the types and quantities of products or services that are being requested.

  • POs help suppliers track shipments and payments. They also help buyers monitor timely receipt of the products. POs are prepared by the buyer and include a unique PO number as a reference.

  • An Invoice is a document issued by a seller to a buyer indicating items sold, prices, date of shipment, delivery and payment terms.

Product Line

A product line is a group of related products manufactured by a single brand and sold by the same company

  • Examples: Home and hard goods, Apparel, Footwear, etc..

Product Category

A product category refers to products within a Product Line that offer the same general functionality.

  • Example: Apparel has T-shirt, Jeans, Jackets, etc.; Footwear has shoes, sneakers, boots, etc.

Style

Within a product category, a company can create numerous products, each one of this products belongs to a single style. Several factors distinguish styles: designs, materials, usage, measurements, segment, etc.

Item / SKU

In the field of inventory management, a stock keeping unit (SKU) is the distinctive identifier of an item and all the attributes associated with it.

  • SKUs can also refer to a unique identifier or code often portrayed as a machine-readable bar code that helps identify said item
  • To have regulated and standardized IDs, Global trade Item Number (GTIN) or Universal Product Code (UPC), can be used.

Packing Type

  1. SOLID

All the items in the carton have the same style, size and colour. That is to say, all items in the carton have the same SKU number.

solid packaging

  1. Assortment

Assortment packaging can take various forms:

  • Same / different style, same size, different colors
  • Same / different style, different sizes, same colors
  • Same / different style, different sizes, different colors

assortment packaging

The whole table shows how the carton is packed by different items. For each Item, just like Solid packing, we can know the colour, size and order / available quantity of that Item / It will show how many items of a SKU will be in one carton – the configuration number.

Point of Measurement

POM codes are used to specify the measuring points of a garment or product. If you measure garments, you will need to have codes to indicate the location you measured of the product

POM

Each POM has 3 core fields which are captions, tolerance and unit. It also has a list of standard values for each size. One product style consisting of many items (SKUs) will always share the same measurement chart