Catalog Hierarchy

OneTruth allows for setting up catalog hierarchy which drives some decisions such as item search and validation, and safety stock configuration. For example, consider an enterprise that sells eyewear as part of its merchandise. To set up the catalog hierarchy for eyewear, the following are some details that need to be provided:

• Category Code: A unique code that can be used while setting up an item to extract and populate parent category and child categories for the item. For example, the category code for eyewear may be 145.

• Category Description: Description of the category to refer back to and understand its need. For example, EYEWEAR is a category description.

• Category Level: Indicates the level of the category in the hierarchy. For example, the category level of eyewear may be 3, which corresponds to the position of the category in the category path.

• Category Path: Provides the complete category hierarchy for a particular category. A category path may contain multiple category code levels, which represent the parent category as well as the sub-categories. For example, the category path for eyewear may be 1/9/145. Here, 1 may refer to the merchandise category, also known as the parent category, or category code level 1. 9 may refer to the optics category, also known as a sub-category or category code level 2. 145 may refer to the eyewear category, which is a sub-category of optics or category code level 3.

• Status: Indicates whether this hierarchy is active or not. If the status is set to “True”, then the catalog hierarchy is active, and if set to “False”, then the catalog hierarchy is inactive.

When an item is set up in OneTruth and the parent category of the item is provided as one of the category codes in the catalog hierarchy list, then the item is automatically populated by OneTruth, along with the child categories, by splitting and assigning the category path. For example, the enterprise selling eyewear as part of its merchandise may choose to create a new eyewear item. When this item along with its parent category code is set up in OneTruth, then the item is automatically populated along with its sub-categories, and a category path is assigned to it, such as /1/9/145. In conclusion, the hierarchy in this example states that merchandise (1) is the highest level of the hierarchy, followed by optics (9), and eyewear (145).