Inventory Formations Overview

Use inventory formations to group products together.  You add products to the formation and give it a name.  Then, you can recall the formation in order to apply a STORIS function to the products in the formation. For example, you can link inventory formations with specific products. Then when the product is added to an order, a pop-up screen prompts for add-on sales of the products in the associated inventory formation(s).  

You can link an inventory formation to a sales discount code so that the discount code is available only for the products in the inventory formation. For example, you can define a formation to allow access to a sales discount for all products associated with Vendor A. Within that formation, you can include other selected product categories, groups, vendors, and individual products.  You can also choose to exclude certain categories, groups, vendors, and individual products - including products from Vendor A.

You build your inventory formations using any combination of the following elements:

• individual products

• product categories

• product groups

• product vendors

Each element contains one or more products. For each element you add to a formation, you specify whether to include or exclude the products from the element in the formation.  Once the inventory formation includes all the products you want, you can then link the inventory formation to a STORIS entity (such as a sales discount code) for use within the system.  

Within an inventory formation, products can be any of the following:

• Explicitly Included - the inventory formation includes the product or the product’s vendor, category, or group.

• Explicitly Excluded - the inventory formation excludes the product or the product’s vendor, category, or group.  

If an inventory formation both explicitly includes and explicitly excludes a product, the exclusion overrides the inclusion.

For example, assume you have Product ABC for Vendor 123.  If an inventory formation explicitly includes Vendor 123 but explicitly excludes Product ABC, product ABC is not part of that inventory formation.

• Implicitly Included - the inventory formation defines only exclusion criteria and the product is not explicitly excluded by that criteria (that is, everything but the specified products).

You can create three types of formations:

• all elements included - the formation includes all products you specify and excludes all others.

• all elements excluded - the formation excludes all products you specify and includes all others.

• some elements included, some excluded - the formation includes all products you specify except those you explicitly exclude.  If a product in the formation is both explicitly included and explicitly excluded, the exclusion criteria overrides the inclusion criteria.

 If you define multiple inventory formations for a STORIS function (for example, discount codes), the discount code is valid for all products included in at least one of the inventory formations - even if one of the formations excludes the products. For example, assume you have Inventory Formation 1 and Inventory Formation 2, and Sales Discount A is assigned to both. Also assume that Product X is included in Inventory Formation 1 and excluded in Inventory Formation 2.  In this example, whenever Product X appears on a line item, Sales Discount A will be available.