Product "Variant" Question (Bus Analysis, really)

AdmiralB

Member
Product \"Variant\" Question (Bus Analysis, really)

My company is in the beginning stages of international sales. We make and sell consumer products, some of which are sort of 'household standards' in the USA.

They will require slight revision to sell outside of North America. At a minimum, it means different included documentation and warranty paperwork, inside the retail box. It also includes different labeling, and maybe also some small parts added to allow the product to work in the customer's country.

Speaking conceptually (i.e. not as pertains to a specific ERP system or version, though we happen to be 8.0), what are the possibilities for PDM?

My position is, these are different SKUs and require their own BOM. Since our current procedure (as international volume is very very small) is remanufacture - we take the US SKU from stock, pull some stuff out, put some stuff in, and relabel - the BOM would be as simple as one US SKU, minus the removed stuff, plus the added stuff. And a generic routing to capture labor involved.

The trick is order entry and fulfillment. As I mentioned, some of these products are 'standards' and there is significant desire to have international customers order the same item numbers that the US uses. We could handle this through customer cross-reference, and simply call the US SKU the customer's PN; this would 'convert' the order into the region-specific item. But when we ship, the invoice and associated shipping docs won't show the same item the customer ordered.

If we somehow fool the system and turn the region-specific item back into the US item for shipping, then our inventory control will have big problems keeping track of what's what.

How are other companies doing this?
 
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