4.2. Imported Data

Depending on what you are going to do – generate demand and procurement plans, perform revenue forecasting, or optimize your inventory, Streamline needs different data to be imported. In this article, we describe the data types required for each case.

Streamline imports a wide range of data types. All of them are logically divided into the following data pieces:

Transactions. This represents frequently changed data that consist of sales transactions or even all of your inventory movements. These are historical transactions, i.e. represent data of closed or archived documents.

Item info. This is typically static and rarely changed data that characterize each planning item using a set of properties. Typically it refers to item master data.

Channel info. These data types allow assigning channels for those items that have not been sold yet, i.e. are not represented in the sales history.

Orders to receive. Data types of this group describe products that are on open manufacturing, transfer, and purchase orders. These include items that are being delivered or built currently.

Orders to ship. This data describe items that are to leave your system, i.e. products on open sales orders or back-orders, components on open manufacturing orders that will be consumed, items that should leave the source location based on the open transfer orders, and others.

Bill of materials. The data types of this piece describe the structure of your bill of materials as well as restrictions of the manufacturing process. These are required for material requirements planning.

Promotions. This data allows Streamline to take into account future promotions when it generates the forecasts. Provide this data if you frequently use promotions for selling products and demand significantly depends on the promotion's discounts.

Substitutions. If you have kitted items in your inventory but want to forecast and plan only by their components, Streamline can automatically disassemble them and take into account this information. Data types of this group describe the information required for the disassembling.

Batch expiration. This data is typically imported when you deal with perishable products. It allows Streamline to account for the product expiration date when it generates the replenishment plan.

Inventory parameters. This piece of data allows Streamline to take into account future changes in supply chain parameters, like Max lot.

Next: Transactions