There are situations when one product should be replaced by another one. For example, they are equivalent, or one of them is going out of the market and another one is a newer version of the former. Then the sales history and inventory information of the discontinued product and the new item are merged.

Streamline allows making substitutions easily. There are two ways to do substitutions in Streamline. The first concerns making a single substitution. The second designed to make a set of substitutions at once.

1. Select the item you want to substitute in the Tree View.
2. Go to menu Item > Substitute or right-click on the selected item and choose the Substitute… command in the context menu.

1. Enter the item code that will be used as the substitution for the selected product.

1. Click OK.

Now the histories are merged.

To update the forecast, click the Forecast button.

To make a number of substitutions at once, Streamline allows you to define them as a set of substitution rules, and apply them all by a click of a button. To do that, do the following:

1. Go to the menu Item > Removal substitution rules…
2. Define the rules in the newly appeared Removal/substitution rules dialog.
3. Click Close to close the dialog.
4. Click the Update data button to apply the rules.
5. Click the Forecast button to update the forecasts.

The description of the dialog and the explanation of how to define the rules are given below.

The dialog has a table, displaying a list of rules, and buttons used to manipulate those rules. There are two types of rules: removal rules and substitution rules. Each rule is represented by a single line in the table.

The rules get into the list in two ways. The first way – by using the menu Item > Remove from import or Item > Substitute commands. In this case, the rules are added to the list and applied automatically. Another one is to edit the list manually using a dialog opened by the Edit button click. In this situation, the rules won’t be applied automatically. To apply them, click the Update data button after you close the dialog.

The rules and the result of their application are saved in the project except for the In use flag. Thus, when you open the project and call the dialog, all the rules will have the Unknown label in the In use column of the table.

Table description

The Source item code column shows the item code that was substituted or removed.

The In use column indicates whether the rule is in use now (Yes) or not (No). The Unknown indicates that the rules have been edited manually using the Edit button but not applied now.

The Substitute with column shows the item code used as the substitution for the source code if the rule is substitution type. Removal rules are labeled as ‘(removed)’.

Buttons

Clear button removes all the rules from the list.

Remove button removes the selected rule from the list.

Edit button is used to change the list of the rules. The button switches the dialog in the list editing state shown below.

Here you can manually enter the rules using the following syntax:

• A single rule for a line.
• Substitution rule syntax: <Source item code>,<Target item code>.
• Removal rule syntax: <Item code to be removed>.
• If you need the item code to contain:
  • Quotes - duplicate them and put the result in additional quotes. Example: “Item ““Green apple”””.
  • Spaces at the beginning or at the end - put the entry in quotes, adding spaces. Example: “ Green apple “.
  • A comma - put the result in quotes. Example: “Apple, green”.

Apply button saves the changes you made to the list of the rules.

Revert button returns the list to the previous state.

Next: Evaluating the Forecasts

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