9.                  Products

The product catalogue is read-only when accessed from the Sales work area and is maintained in the Settings-Product Catalog work area.

A list of products is maintained each with a product id and a name. The products are not made available in the Sages area until they have been added to a pricelist as price list items.

Substitute products can be indicated against a product record and links made to the sales literature and competitor entities. Products can also be defined as Product Kits by selecting the Convert to Product Kit option in the actions menu. A kit may have several constituent products to form a bill of materials.

Note:    The author has developed a program to assist in uploading products into CRM from a spreadsheet. See http://www.redware.com/mscrm.

9.1.              Unit Groups and Items

Unit Groups and Unit Items need to be defined before products can be added successfully into the system. Unit Groups are designed to reflect types of measurement so, for example, liquids might have a unit of one millilitre as the smallest primary unit. Unit Items are multiples of the primary unit, so a unit of one litre might be defined for liquids. For whole items, a Unit Group might be maintained with single units (each), tens, and maybe a dozen or a gross defined for multiples of whole units.

Each product must have a default Unit Item taken from a Unit Group that specifies the available unit items permissible for the product.

9.2.              Price List Items

Products require a short code product identifier and a one-line product name as well as the unit group and default unit item and the decimals supported value. The default currency can be specified and then the price list item needs to be added using before the product will available for use in the sales cycle.

The price list item specifies the pricing of a product, for a particular pricelist (and currency) and unit item. Once entered, the product is available in the sales cycle (for the appropriate currency only) and the default pricelist can be set against the product.

Products are one of the problematic areas of CRM particularly if you have a large number of products to enter into the system because of the effort required to enter and maintain products and their pricing information manually with the CRM user interface. Installations with a large number of constantly changing product pricelists will need to look at some form or automation or programmatic provisioning.

9.3.              Discount Lists

Discount lists can be defined to provide different discounts according to the quantity ordered. A trade discount list might, for example, apply a 10% discount if more than 100 items are ordered. The discount list can be referenced for the price list tem to automatically apply quantity discounts on a quotation.

Note:    A discount of 100% can be applied for product samples.