Manufacturers Update

The action brings a manufacturer from the ERP system into TRADElube, with its name and its texts. It is the prerequisite for Products Update being able to give an article its manufacturer: the article only names the manufacturer's identifier there, and that has to have arrived here already.

What gets transferred

Each call is about exactly one manufacturer. TRADElube looks it up through the identifier sent along and the matching channel mapping.

Where none is found, a new one is not created straight away. TRADElube then looks in the client for a manufacturer of the same name and writes into that one. That is how an ERP system can be connected to a stock that already holds the manufacturers, without every one of them being created a second time. Only where that finds nothing either is a new manufacturer created.

How the transfer plan is built

The plan sits in the channel, in the Transfer Plans section under Manufacturers and there in the Update tab. It has two sections.

Section What sits in it
Common The single mandatory assignment Name
Descriptions Link for the address of the manufacturer's site, plus Short Description and Description

The two text rows of the second section share one source, namely the ERP system's description field. Out of the box only Short Description is ticked, because an ERP text is short as a rule. If you want it in the long field instead, tick Description and untick Short Description.

Where your client keeps several language versions, Descriptions gets a tab of its own per language version. With exactly one, the tab bar is absent.

Special features and limits

A manufacturer is only found again by its name. Unlike a product it carries no number of its own in the client, so the name is the only mark by which TRADElube recognizes an existing one. Two manufacturers of the same name in the client are therefore a source of error, and the search breaks off with an error instead of picking one of the two.

The name comparison only applies the first time. Where the ERP system changes a manufacturer's name afterwards, TRADElube changes the existing record, because the channel mapping is already there.

Further reading