The possibility to mass create parts for many sites dramatically facilitates for companies that have many parts, many sites, and short product life cycles. It reduces the amount of work required for part creation to a minimum. It provides a possibility to centralize the initial setup of parts. In addition, it reduces the risk of inconsistent data between sites, since the data is initialized from one single source.
Assortments and site clusters form the foundation for a successful mass creation of parts. Remember, assortment in this context is your company's assortment, and should not be confused with the assortment of your supplier.
Assortments and site clusters are two different types of structures. These structures consist of nodes; ordinary nodes as well as part or site nodes. Ordinary nodes are not connected to a part or a site; they are mainly building blocks for building the structure. A part node is a node connected to a part catalog part while a site node is a node connected to one of your user-allowed sites. A part or a site node is always the lowest level in a structure. This means that a part node or a site node cannot be a parent to other nodes. Within one specific assortment or site cluster, each node has a unique identity. This means that the same node identity can exist several times in the database but only once in the same assortment or the same site cluster. Consequently, a part can only exist once in the same assortment and a site only once in the same site cluster. You can create as many assortments and as many site clusters as you want. Furthermore, you can create extensive structures with as many nodes as you want in each structure.
You start to define your assortment and your site cluster and build your structures. Remember that it is optional to create a site cluster; i.e., it is possible to eventually create many parts for many sites without having a site cluster defined. At the bottom of the assortment, you connect part catalog parts. When you do this, so called part nodes are automatically created; one part node per part. You can choose to either connect already existing part catalog parts, or create and connect new part catalog parts. If you choose the latter, it means that you automatically create a new part in part catalog. At the bottom of the site cluster, you connect user-allowed sites. When you do this, so called site nodes are automatically created; one site node per site.
To facilitate the use of the structures, it is important to enter levels. The assortment levels and site cluster levels are shown in several places in the application. The level makes it easier for you to understand the hierarchy and to orient yourself when working with the assortments and the site clusters. All nodes will be automatically assigned to the correct level when the nodes are created or when the nodes are moved. This means that you do not connect nodes to levels; it happens automatically.
Before creating parts per site, you need to enter defaults. Defaults can be entered on any assortment node; ordinary nodes as well as part nodes. Defaults entered for a parent node are also valid for all sub-nodes in the whole branch below. However, defaults can be overridden by defaults entered further down in the branch. To facilitate the entering of defaults, you will see all defaults entered for a parent node when you are working with a sub-node. You can only enter inventory part characteristic defaults if a node or a parent node in the assortment is connected to a characteristic template. The template strictly defines for which characteristics you are allowed to enter defaults. All defaults are entered per site, site cluster node, company, country, or a combination. Site has the highest priority and can never be combined with the other three. The priority between the four fields is: site, site cluster node, company, and country. The company is the company connected to the site; the site for which the background job will try to create parts. The country is the country defined on the delivery address connected to the site; the site for which the background job will try to create parts.
Example: Site 1 belongs to site cluster node A. Site 1 is a site in company 10. Site 1's delivery address is situated in Sweden (SE). If you use all these fields when you define your defaults for, for instance, planner, the priority will be the following:
| Site | Site Cluster Node | Company | Country | Priority |
| 1 | * | * | * | 1 |
| * | A | 10 | SE | 2 |
| * | A | 10 | * | 3 |
| * | A | * | SE | 4 |
| * | A | * | * | 5 |
| * | * | 10 | SE | 6 |
| * | * | 10 | * | 7 |
| * | * | * | SE | 8 |
| * | * | * | * | 9 |
For supplier for purchase part defaults, you must remember that the field Supplier plays two different roles. Supplier is an ordinary default; i.e., you can define what supplier to use per site, site cluster node, company, country, or a combination. At the same time, you can enter the other defaults per supplier.
To make sure that the background job will be able to create inventory parts, sales parts, purchase parts, and supplier for purchase parts, you must enter, at least, the following defaults.
| Default tab | Defaults needed |
| Inventory Part Defaults | Planner, UoM |
| Inventory Part Characteristic Defaults | - |
| Sales Part Defaults | Sales Price Group, Sales Part Group, Price/Curr |
| Purchase Part Defaults | - |
| Supplier for Purchase Part Defaults | Supplier, Price/Curr |
When you eventually want to create many parts for many sites, you choose a node in the assortment structure and a node in the site cluster structure. Remember that the assortment must be in status Active. Note that you do not have to have a site cluster, you can simply list sites. All parts belonging to the chosen assortment node and all its sub-nodes, will be created for all sites belonging to the chosen site cluster node and all its sub-nodes. One background job will be started for each site, but the job will try to create a complete set of data per part at the time. The background job tries to create the following part data:
It is optional to create sales parts and supplier for purchase parts; you can decide this by selecting a couple of options when you start the background job. However, the job always tries to create inventory parts and inventory part characteristics. Furthermore, the background job always tries to create purchase parts unless the part type is Manufactured.
Note: if you run the background job repeatedly and change the defaults in between, the job will never update already existing part data, it will only create new. However, let's say that you have a part that is a purchased inventory part, but is not yet a sales part. If you run the background job again, with correct defaults, the job will create a sales part. Technically speaking, the background job never updates existing records in the database, it only creates new.
Delimitations:
Assortments and site clusters can only be used for creating new parts per site; it is not designed for maintaining already existing part data. However, by using the Find&Replace functionality in Parts by Assortment and Site Cluster it is possible to maintain part data.
It is not possible to use assortments and site clusters for creating package parts, non-inventory parts, or several sales parts per inventory part.
It is not possible to use assortments and site clusters for creating an internal supplier for a purchase part if that part does not exist as an inventory part at the site connected to the internal supplier. Therefore, if, for instance, you have a central warehouse supplying many stores it is advisable to start creating all the parts for the warehouse site before creating the parts for the stores.