Item-to-supplier relationships

In this relationship, an item is related to a supplier. A supplier is the entity that supplies the particular product to the enterprise.

The entity is integral to the item's definition and can be defined in multiple ways: supplier, manufacturer, distributor. Because the item-supplier relationship is defined during item setup, the supplier entity must to be in data model so that the relationship can be established. You can model the supplier entity as a supplier catalog or lookup table with a limited set of attributes such as:

Supplier ID
Supplier name
Supplier status
Supplier contact

To update data, you must ensure that the data is read-only in the financial or merchandising application and you must be able to expose an interface in IBM® Product Master. For example, iPod is supplied by Apple Computer, Inc. Therefore, there is a relationship between the item, iPod and the supplier, that is, Apple Computer, Inc.

Within top of the item-supplier relationship, you can define a group of attributes such as supplier cost, supplier country, supplier packaging, and other attributes.

You can model the item-to-supplier relationship in one of the two ways:

By modeling the supplier as a multi-occurrence attribute: You can model the supplier as a multi-occurrence attribute on the item and within that multi-occurrence define a subset of attributes. This approach works well for a limited number of suppliers per item.
By modeling the supplier as a hierarchy: You can model the supplier as a hierarchy and map the item to a particular entity (category). This scenario works well for a large set of suppliers per item, and is efficient in determining the list of items supplied by a particular supplier. However, this approach makes it difficult to determine the suppliers from a given item from the user interface.

Use the following approach to determine the correct approach to modeling supplier data:

Scenario	Data modeling main points
Scenario 1: < 10 suppliers per item Item-supplier queries	Model supplier as a catalog or a lookup table. Limit the number of supplier attributes in Product Master. Create an item-supplier relationship attribute on an item. Create a multiple occurrence of the item-supplier relationship attribute. Define attribute subset under the item-supplier relationship. Define an attribute subset to include NPA attribute and to show the supplier name on user interface.
Scenario 2: < 10 suppliers per item Item-supplier queries Supplier-item queries	Model the supplier as hierarchy with each supplier entity as a category and use hierarchy to organize suppliers into groups. Limit the number of supplier (category) attributes in Product Master. Classify item under a supplier to establish item-supplier relationship. Define the item-supplier attribute subset as item hierarchy spec.
Scenario 3: > 10 suppliers per item Item-supplier queries Supplier-item queries	Model supplier as a catalog or a lookup table. Create an item-supplier catalog or user-define logs (UDLs) for improving the performance. Create a custom tool so that users can create an item-supplier relationship and enter values for the attributes. Create a custom tool so that users can view the items for a given item. Create a custom tool so that users can view the items for a given supplier.