Lot Item Products Overview

Before you can enter a lot item on a sales order, it must exist as a product in Product Maintenance. In essence, a lot item product is a placeholder for all of the materials you intend to direct ship from a specified vendor. It can best be compared to a box. Boxes are useless until they are filled with items.

Requirements

Lot item products do not require any setup other than an identification number and a description, but the system requires all products to include certain information. For example, you must assign both a price line and a buy line to the lot item. This information is used for reporting purposes. If no price lines or buy lines apply for the lot item, because the materials that will be ordered come from a variety of price lines or buy lines, you can create a generic price line and buy line to use for the lot item. Also, lot items do not require a price sheet, because you negotiate prices and costs during sales order entry. However, you must attach price sheets to all products in the system.

Lot Item Product Descriptions

The lot item's product description can come from the Primary Index, a Catalog index, or can be user-defined. For ease of identification when searching for the lot item in Sales Order Entry, we recommend that you include Lot Item as a keyword for the product. You can keep the product description simple, if you like, and then enter a more detailed description when you enter the lot item on a sales order that, for example, includes the name of the project. You may want to set up several lot items for any jobs for which you frequently receive contracts. For example, if you often supply GE Distribution Switchgears and Office Lighting Package to customers, you can create lot items for each of these. By setting up general lot item products, you don't have to enter a new lot item product each time you receive a contract.

Sample Lot Item Products

Product Description in Product Maintenance	Product Description in Sales Order Entry	Price Line	Buy Line
GE Distribution Switchgear	GE Distribution Switchgear for Johnson High School Project	GE	GE
GE Distribution Switchgear	GE Distribution Switchgear for Bethesda Naval Hospital Project	LotItem	LotItem
Office Lighting Package	Office Lighting Package for Johnson High School Project	LotItem	Sylvania
Office Lighting Package	Office Lighting Package for Bethesda Naval Hospital Project	GE	LotItem

Maintenance Considerations

Because all lot item order generations ship from your vendor to your customer:

The system does not commit on-hand quantities for lot item materials added from the Product Primary or Catalog indexes.
Inventory forecasting and automated purchasing product demand calculations do not use lot item products, or include inventory items that you add to the material detail from the Product Primary or Catalog indexes.
Lot items are not available on the reorder pad and cannot be copied to the Order Entry (OE) Clipboard.