creating a product code structure that works

[VIK007]

Hi,

I am looking to create a structure to generate product codes for all our stock items.

any suggestions how i can create a suitable structure that:

a) works
b) easy to distinguise what the product is perhaps from a item code?

Thanks

 

[garyk]

How many characters? And do you need to include location stuff like bin location?

 

[VIK007]

Don't mind characters to be honest. Was thinking around 8 was resonable.

No not necessary with bin/locations.

 

[abbasmuraj]

Perhaps the first three or 4 characters from the actual brand make followed by sequential numbers?

 

[VIK007]

is it to confusing to say-

Three letters of brand then a letter for the size and then colour at end or can this be confusing in the long run?

 

[Deleted member 162294]

Really depends on the product. I assume you're doing clothes.

Some clothes may have a multiple of colours or may be one size fits all. I think just a number should suffice. Also it depends on how you're planning to use it. The code should uniquely identify one product from another product with the same or similar name.

So when you mean it should "work" how do you intend it to work?

 

[Philip Hoyle]

Work backwards from how you want it to work and what systems will need to use it. What part of the code will you need to search/reference most often?

Check the limitations of your stock/accounts/costing software - i.e. is the stock code limited to a certain number of characters, or is it limited to only numerics, or only alpha characters. Will your software be able to cope with searches and reporting on any character range, i.e. search the last 2 digits?

A lot of people devise a brilliantly clever coding structure, spent hours/days creating lists, organising & labelling stocks and stores bins/shelves, etc., only to find that their "off the shelf" accounts/stock/bar code/POS software won't work because the code is too long, contains invalid characters or the search/reporting function isn't flexible enough.

I've seen it far too often. The biggest foul up was for a large design & manufacturing firm. The production manager spent months setting up a coding/identification structure that was absolute genius in that one look at the code would tell you the size (length, width, depth), material, supplier, drawing number, pressure, manufacture date, job number. He ran all his purchase ordering, stock control, quality control, job costing, etc., by a fiendishly complicated spreadsheet, which he'd set up to pick and report on various components of the stock code - it literally ran to hundreds of sheets, all inter-linked etc. The firm was fast growing and soon the spreadsheet became unmanagable so they looked at buying production/stock software instead. Then came the problem - they couldn't find any software that could cope with the length and characters used in the stock coding, so they had to renumber everything to numbers that didn't actually mean anything, i.e. contained no information, but used the software database to set attributes to each stock item - took them many more months to get a proper database up and running.

So, I'd suggest that you look at software first and work backwards. Most software will have fields beside the basic stock code so the code itself doesn't need to have all the information you need. Use the software as the database. For example, you could have a very simple stock number that means absolutely nothing, i.e. 123456, but within the software, that code is allocated a stores bin location, is linked to a particular supplier, has pricings allocated to it, has different sizes as sub-items of it, etc. Decent software will have plenty of "fields" for each stock item to be selected against. So you'd use the software to search for stock by supplier, stock in a certain size, etc. using database "tags/fields" rather than the stock code itself.

 

[Talay]

... Then came the problem - they couldn't find any software that could cope with the length and characters used in the stock coding, so they had to renumber everything to numbers that didn't actually mean anything, i.e. contained no information, but used the software database to set attributes to each stock item - took them many more months to get a proper database up and running......

Perhaps back in the day of 8 bits and very limited processing / storage power and I did see this in the banks with Italian Lira and then Turkish Lire which were at multiples so high to GBP that their absolute numbers were too large for the systems; not surprising really when TRL was well into the millions per £1 at a time.

However today, with almost limitless computing power readily available for quite low cost, the issue would be a non starter for a software developer.

The most common design "fault" today is email address character string length which was often just copied from a street character string in the database and consequently is often limited 30 or 40 characters.

As for searches, then that also may have been an issue historically but I haven't seen a non alphanumeric search function in ages.

Surely if you were doing this today and going bespoke none of these would be an issue and even if you were buying off shelf, it would be hard to imagine any software written since Y2K which would limit the user in such a way.

 

[Duke Fame]

Hi,

I am looking to create a structure to generate product codes for all our stock items.

any suggestions how i can create a suitable structure that:

a) works
b) easy to distinguise what the product is perhaps from a item code?

Thanks

In the clothes shop I work with we use:

first 4 - season ie SS13, AW12
next 2 - category 01 - low priced dresses, 02- mid price dresses
next 2 - colour bl, Wh, Gr (grey), Gn (green)
next 2 size - 08, 10, 0S, 0M, 0L, XL
next 3 brand - Lev (levi) Btr (Bolonngaro Trevor) HNM (hunt no more) BBB (home brand)


I then just analyse the figures by extracting the data on an excel speadsheet.

The answer to your question is simply use a god that works for you. As mentioned before, work backwards from what you want to do with the stock data. We needed to know what we had in stock but moreover, what brand, size, product category, colour etc was selling well or badly.

 

[Philip Hoyle]

Perhaps back in the day of 8 bits and very limited processing / storage power and I did see this in the banks with Italian Lira and then Turkish Lire which were at multiples so high to GBP that their absolute numbers were too large for the systems; not surprising really when TRL was well into the millions per £1 at a time.

However today, with almost limitless computing power readily available for quite low cost, the issue would be a non starter for a software developer.

The most common design "fault" today is email address character string length which was often just copied from a street character string in the database and consequently is often limited 30 or 40 characters.

As for searches, then that also may have been an issue historically but I haven't seen a non alphanumeric search function in ages.

Surely if you were doing this today and going bespoke none of these would be an issue and even if you were buying off shelf, it would be hard to imagine any software written since Y2K which would limit the user in such a way.

You'd think so wouldn't you? But, even today, there's "off the shelf" accounts/stock software that has this kind of limitations. That's why I say that you shouldn't "assume" that modern software will be able to cope with long codes and will be able to do alpha searches etc - there are still products on the market that can't.

 

[VIK007]

I am using sage that uses Alpha and numeric.

What I want to be able to do is..sort stock in order, and know what item it is from the product code.

My variations are:

Sport (cricket, football, hockey, tennis)


, product name (Venus, pro, elite, raven)

colour (red, yellow, green,milticolour, light red, dark red)

size ( 4,5,6,7,small medium large x large ,

Some product are for left hand and others right hand..eg cricket gloves..

 

[thelegalstop]

What product are you selling? There is some software which will generate codes for you, however I think that the structure should be specific in order to be able to read the codes yourself and know if not exactly then roughly which product is associated with this code.