Dynamics 365 Business Central: SKUs

Dynamics 365 Business Central: SKUs

We are going to talk about something called Stock Keeping Units or SKUs, I’m sure you have heard the work SKU, you might not hear, Stock keeping units, but that is what it is. In business central Stock Keeping unit is used to separate out the items when they are in different locations, so what we are working with today is an Item, the actual coffee mug of the coffee cup within the location. When we combine these two together, we have something called the Stock keeping unit.  Why would we want to do that? the reason is, if we have the same item inside one location, it might behave differently  as the same item in a different location, so in location A we might have different parameter like all the reordering points vs location B. Let’s see how that is in a diagram  

Identify items locations as different entities 
We have an item and we have a location, so what we want to do is identify items in particular locations as different entities, and when we do that, we work in something called SKU or stock keeping unit. So, we have a specific entity for the coffee cup in the main location, and a specific entity for the coffee cup in the west location. We can set up different parameters for the coffee cup in main vs the west. They could have different reorder points, they could have different reorder quantities and many other things that could set them aside. These are the connections that we use in order to set up different parameters for different locations, but the same item.   

Stock keeping units 
Let’s look at the system, what we want to do is get into the paper coffee cup and take a look at something called stocked keeping units.  This is a thing that helps us do what we needed to do which is have the reordering happen in a location independently. Before we were just looking at the blank location and it would reorder into the blank location which is great. But as we talked before, we want to be in locations, not in the blank location. We might want to have a different reorder point for each location or even the same reorder point for each location. But to order for both locations. Let’s say its two offices, two coffee machines and we need to have the stock for each coffee machines independently.  

I’ll go here into stock keeping units, right now there is nothing set up, so I'm going to create a new one. It’s pretty simple, all I have to do is select the location I want to create a stock keeping unit for. In this case, I want the Main location and then I can look down here and I see I have the planning tab, just like I had in the Item. And it copies the parameters from the item. So now I have this specifically for the main location.   

I'm going to go ahead and create another one, this is for the west location, so the west location and the main location have coffee machines that I need to track. I have the same thing here; the fixed reorder quantity is copied from the item. I have 100 and 500. One thing to note is that business central does not list the locations here in the Stock keeping unit list. You can see that we have two rectos, but you don’t see which location that is. The reason for that is because they are focused on showing us the variant code. In this case, we are not using the variant code, we are just going by the location. You can probably customize the screen to add the location code. I’m not going to do that here, but then you can see the location and variant, which would make more sense; So, Microsoft, I think I would update the screen; 

We go out of here and go into the item list, now if I go into actions, requisition worksheet, I can go ahead and hit, calculate a plan for the item. Remember, now we have these stock keeping units. So, it’s going to be looking at the stock keeping units, not the item when it's calculating. And it’s not going to look at the blank location. I’m going to go ahead and just hit ok. Now we see it. Its calculating for the main 500 pieces and for the west. 500 pieces. But it ignored the blank location because once we get into stock keeping units, we can no longer work with the blank location in a normal way, so that means we've advanced beyond the blank location so to speak.