Item, Item Type, Item Class

Item

Objects of the Item object type (formerly referred to as 'Product') represent products and services from the requesting and accounting point of view. They can be seen as an interface between components and orders/contracts.

Each piece or unit of delivered infrastructure is represented by an item. Items are typically created during the first (administrative) step of Incoming Goods.

One can imagine received items as the purchased packages that have been received and checked against the invoice and/or the original order/contract. Items do not represent actual pieces of infrastructure, these are represented by components created from items in the second (technical) step of Incoming Goods.

An item may represent not only purchased infrastructure but also a unit of maintenance/service that has been delivered. Such delivered maintenance/service can stand alone (e.g. a telephone service delivered on the basis of a contract with a telecommunication company), or it may be linked to specific component(s) maintained by the delivered maintenance/service. These "maintained" components will be assigned to more than one item. One item will represent the delivery of infrastructure (the actual component) and one or more items will represent the maintenance.

Item Type

Item types (formerly referred to as 'Product Type') represent deliverable products and services from the sales and accounting point of view.

Item type is a business name for all infrastructure or services that can be purchased under the same name, even from different vendors. Each request item/order item/contract item refers to one item type. Item type defines whether and how components should be created for corresponding delivered items.

An item type must be assigned to a higher level categorization object type – Item Class. On each item type, an estimation of costs/price (general price) can be stored (which may not necessarily be the same as the price offered by a certain vendor at a certain time). Pricing and delivery details are stored in offers assigned to the item type.

Item versus Item Type

Each request item/order item/contract item refers to one item type and states the desired quantity of units of this type. Only when the infrastructure or maintenance/service is delivered, the desired quantity of actual items is created.

Each created item is also linked to an item type. Typically it would be the same item type as the one on the corresponding order item/contract item. However, the received items can be assigned item type different from the ordered item type, for instance in a situation when the vendor ran out of the ordered item type and volunteered to deliver a better item type for the same price. This situation is resolved during Incoming Goods.

Item Type versus Component Type

Item types represent deliverable products and services from the sales and accounting point of view while component types represent the technical point of view. Relevant identification attributes (such as GTIN or SKU ('Stock-keeping Unit')) are inherited between item type and component type. Dependencies between item types and component types are stored as 'Item Type Assignment To Component Type' objects.

Item Class

Item Class (formerly referred to as 'Product Class') groups several item types into a larger group according to general characteristics relevant to the procurement, sales and accounting point of view. Each item type must be assigned an item class.

Examples of item classes supplied with standard Valuemation include 'PC', 'Monitor', 'Printer', 'SW Host' or 'SW Operating System'.

Important characteristics of items are defined at the item class level:

• Create System
• Create Component
• Software
• Price, Currency and other financial attributes

Service request shop categories are assigned at the level of item classes. Shop category assignment can then be simplified by default categories to item classes.

Assigning a category as 'default for item class' results in the following behaviour: when a shop offer is created, it is automatically assigned the category/categories assigned as default to the item class of the item type on which the shop offer is based.