UPC as Itemlookupcodes

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I would appreciate some help/best practices with Itemlookupcodes. We moved to RMS from ECI Advantage about three months ago and currently have 160,000+ items in our system.

We had a lot of duplicate items in our old POS/ERP system and would like to find a way to stop this problem. Would anyone recommend using UPC codes as Itemlookupcodes? We of course would keep in-house Itemlookups for any item without a barcode.

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Grier Fleischhauer 782 on at

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RE: UPC as Itemlookupcodes

We have about 80,000 items and we use UPC all the time. I prefer to use the manufacturer's UPC number because I don't want to print new labels -- we use a price gun to mark each item for the price. The issue I have with using alias' is that when it comes time for inventory counting or doing a movement reports, only the ILC is available, the alias' are not readily available to see under the ILC for counting purposes. I like the fact that a UPC is unique to each vendor. In some cases though I create my own UPC code and then print UPC labels with the price on the label to stick over the manufacturer's UPC code. This would allow you to still have several manufacturers under the same UPC code. In the convention of UPC codes, the number 4 has been reserved for in-store use (so no vendor can ever use a UPC code that starts with a number 4). This means you can create a UPC that has the following convention: 4 aaaaa bbbbb where aaaaa is a unique 5 digit number that I assign to a vendor and then bbbbb is just a sequential 5 digit number starting with 00000, then 00001, then 00002 etc. The final UPC code would be: 40000000000 and let the label software create the check digit code.

I keep an excel spreadsheet on a share folder for my employees to keep track of the aaaaa number assigned to the vendor (my employees can assign this unique number and save it to this file with the vendor name etc). I created an Alpha numbering system as follows: Vendors starting with the letter A would have the vendor aaaaa number assigned 401000 (increment up from here for additional "A" vendors), then vendors with B would have the vendor number assigned 402000 and so on. The file keeps track of what vendor numbers have been used etc.

Hope this makes sense, I have had no problems using unique UPC codes.

Grier

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Community Member on at

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RE: UPC as Itemlookupcodes

Jeff,

Thanks so much for your reply! I think I need to clarify my situation, rereading my post I can see how it was very misleading.

We moved from ECI Advantage POS/ERP to Dynamics RMS in July of this year. Our Partner did an amazing job of moving our inventory file over. While there were a few duplicate Itemlookupcodes (due to Advantage) we easily weeded them out with SQL Queries.

Where our problem lies is that we are creating multiple inhouse Itemlookupcodes for the same item. Let's say we buy item ABCD from vendor 1234, when that item arrives it will be 1234 ABCD in our system. If the item is purchased from another vendor the 1234 would be replaced with another vendor prefix and the item would have multiple ILCs.

We basically have a problem with Item Creation Standardization and with 160K+ items in our system it is not going to get better. Moving to UPCs as Itemlookupcodes would in essence help to solve our problem.

In you example above we would add the additional UPCs as an alias or use an inhouse ILC.

I really wanted to see if there were any problems using UPC as the Itemlookupcode.

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Jeff @ Check Point ... 13,382 on at

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RE: UPC as Itemlookupcodes

RMS does not allow for duped ILC codes, Did you import from something else? If using HQ, are you only creating items at HQ and not the stores.

I don't know if this example fits your industry, bit we sell into Bicycle shops. They all sell a 20 x 2.125 tube that they can buy from numerous distributors, Each has its own UPC code for essentially the same item

If they used the UPC from each disty, they could have 6-10 UPC codes for the same item. Instead they create an in-store ILC and put the disty's UPC in the Alias section. Now when they buy this tube, they order from who they want and then sell the internal ILC using whosever UPC they have in stock.

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Community Member on at

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RE: UPC as Itemlookupcodes

Thanks for your replies!

Jeff,

We are currently using internal SKUs and they are causing a lot of problems as items are duplicated. Item look ups also are a drag on the system having to load the Item table.

What would you say are the serious Cons in using UPCs as our Itemlookupcodes. We are trying to measure the Pros and Cons here and we can't fin many cons.

Our idea would be to use the full UPC as the Itemlookupcode, Model/Vendor Stock Number/Item Characteristics as the Description and additional Information as the Extended Description, finally Sub Description1 would be used for the Manufacturer of the item.

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Jeff @ Check Point ... 13,382 on at

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RE: UPC as Itemlookupcodes

I would not use the UPC as ILC.

Use a 6-7 random number easy to remember if needed.

Use the UPC as an Alias number that refers back to your ILC. That way one can use the internal ILC number for similar items. The UPC refers to only that item from that manufacturer.

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Nicole Hellerud 1,712 on at

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RE: UPC as Itemlookupcodes

Chazh345,

Thank you for your post.

I would recomend using the UPC codes as the Itemlookupcodes. This will allow you to set up barcodes and scan the correct item.

Thanks,

Nicole

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