How to handle seasonal items in NetSuite

Question

My organization sells outdoor equipment (tents, sleeping bags, etc.) and is hitting a roadblock with how to handle seasonal items in NetSuite. We are in the process of standing up Centric as a PLM system for our Product team, which has a product hierarchy starting with the season (for example - you start with 2022, select your product category, then select your product). In NetSuite, all of our products are currently set up as non-matrix inventory items, and we have fields appended with "Next Season" or "Season After Next" to attempt to have all the relevant data on the item record. We are running into a multitude of issues as our business continues to grow, and are working to redefine our item structure.

The tricky bits - our Sales department would like to have products that are "the same" year to year share a SKU so that our retailers can track them as the same inventory. However, these products are not the same year to year from a manufacturing or costing standpoint (we may shift factories, or have material components pricing change which changes our landed cost). From my research, there is no good way around this. We investigated matrix items as a possible solution, but they don't quite fit the need.

Has anyone come across a reasonable solution for something like this? We need a way to either have seasonal (essentially time-series) item data on one item record, or to have multiple item records (one for each season) that share a SKU and can be rolled into reports and inventory calculations as if they were one item.

Any help or ideas here would be greatly appreciated! Cheers!

Answer 1

An approach that could work is to use Assembly Items.

The things that can make this work:

• you can receive assemblies into inventory as though they were inventory items.
• you can have an assembly that has only one component
• you can create and sell multiple revisions of an assembly simultaneously.

So you define an assembly with sku X It has a single sku A from manufacturer B Even initially you might give it a revision of Spring2022

sku A would be a inventory item but you might never have any in stock.

The next bit here is vague because it depends on your PO management process and what automations you have there but you either:

• order sku A; receive MN of them and have a script that autobuilds N sku X rev or
• N sku X rev Spring2022 from vendor B and receive those into inventory.

next season sku X gets a new revision, Summer2022, where sku A is retired and new component sku B is added. You can still fulfill rev Spring 2022 until you are out and then start fufilling rev Summer 2022.

Your costs roll up from you components; your skus stay stable. You have an easy path to clearing old inventory.

In order to track the quantities you have of each revision you would probably need to also set these up as lot numbered assemblies. You could tie the revision to a lot number and automations could help minimize the number of clicks needed to coordinate.

One recommendation is to do whatever you do in a sandbox account. There can be a lot of details to these changes and you might find your self tearing this all apart a couple of times until you are tracking costs the way you want to.

Answer 2

Another approach that could work would be to set your items up to be sourced from multiple vendors. The vendor's purchasing details are then available as sublists on the item and you can place POs for each using each vendor's name for the item. Your main sku still stays stable and you could track per vendor stock levels using lot numbers similar to the assembly idea.

This is a simpler approach but with assembly revisions you have the revision drop-down that could be used to automatically set the batch number. Skipping having to open the Inventory detail dialog would be more work to automate if that becomes important.

To turn this on:

• go to Setup -> Company -> Enable Features then
• select Items and Inventory tab
• check Multiple Vendors