Product Groups

A product group is a collection of products and other product groups that are in some way associated. The structure of a product group is hierarchical in the same manner as sales areas. Product groups form a tree structure that describes the parent-child or tiered relationship between product groups and finally the products themselves. The following illustration demonstrates the types of relationships that can be constructed using product groups:

The above tree structure is derived by the relationship of the product group codes shown after the group names. As you can see each tier of the structure as you move from left to right has two extra characters in the group code. We call this the depth of the tree. A tree can be up to 5 tiers deep.

The parent-child relationship between a group and its subgroups is constructed by concatenating two characters to identify each child to the parent group code. For example all holden cars (Commodore, Berlina and Acclaim) must have the parent group prefix for Holden (0102).

The tree structure of the product groups can be of great assistance in the use of the Acumen system. This structure allows you to visually locate a group of products by following the branches of a tree diagram similar to the one shown above.

This structure also provides the ability to select related groups for processing. For example if the price of all Ford cars should increase by 5% then the Ford group can be selected for price changes of 5%. This will cause all the products in the Ford (0101) group and all products in its subgroups and their subgroups, etc. to be altered. Furthermore if the sales tax on wagons should be increased the product group tree can be used to step from one wagon subgroup to the next making the location and access of products to be effected much easier.

When reporting the product group structure allows for summarisation at varying levels. Using the structure above a sales report can be produced showing just Car and Boat sales, or Ford sales versus Holden. Reporting can typically be limited to a starting and finishing group code (ie. selecting a top branch and bottom branch from the tree in a vertical manner) and to a depth (selecting how many tiers will be printed Left to right).