Item Categories -Category Set and Assignment

When a business maintains an inventory an essential requirement is the assignment of the items to specific categories

To understand this we need to have information of what these terminologies exactly represent

We will try to present here a brief overview of the item categories

Category Set : A category set can be said to a template or a schema on the basis of which we want to categorize items ,
Eg : A business may be involved in manufacturing of good which it wants to categorize on the basis of the countries where it wants to sell a product .In such a scenario the business will define a Category : SELL_COUNTRY and then assign items to this category set specifying to which Country the item is sold.

in order to perform this we need to perform some Steps :

1. Define Flex filed Structures for Item Category Sets : i.e,. If the business wishes to categrize items on the basis of SELL_COUNTRY , they need to create a KFF with specifying the details of the segments the combination of which will specify a valid value
2. Define Categories : Once the Flex-field  is defined we need to navigate to the item categories window and specify the values of categories which can be assigned under this category set
3. Once Item categories have been set up we need to navigate to the Category set window and create the Category set with details of the item categories
4. Once the setup is done the individual Items can be assigned to this categories

If we try to portray this scenario in the above sense take the example as below

Business decides to categorize items on the basis of the Regions :

1. Create a Flexfield with say 3 Segments : Continent - Country - State/Region
2. Specify the values for this Flexfield by Defining the Values Eg : Asia - India-Maharashtra 
3. Create a Category Set SELL_COUNTRY and then specify these values , default  values 
4. Assign the items to a valid category

Once this is done business can build reports to identify which goods are available for selling in Particular regions

One of the main uses of this is Item Assignment.

In a business we will have a number of warehouses , Depending on the Item categories we can run the warehouse assignment for a specific set of Category values thus assigning the items to Warehouses

In the above Example if a business has Multiple warehouses in India for which are under a hierarchy Eg : India-Mahrashtra

In this now if there are many items which need to be available to this warehouses , Item Assignment can be run for this hierarchy, Item Category Sell_COUNTRY with Item category as : Asia-India - Maharashtra. Thus all the items under this category will be picked and then assigned to the warehouses in the hierarchy

Going by business operations it is not possible to perform this activity manually for all items, such a categorization makes the business work efficiently and free from manual errors