How Supply Lens recognises things

Shopify calls your coffee HT-HOUSE-250. Greenleaf Wholesale calls it GL-44871. Its barcode is a 13-digit GTIN. They are all the same bag of coffee. This lesson explains how Supply Lens knows that, using identifiers, and what happens step by step when a Document arrives.

Identifiers: one record, many codes

An identifier is a code, ID, number or reference that a system or trading partner uses to point at one of your records. Each identifier has two parts:

• a type, such as SKU, GTIN-13, Buyer Product Code, GLN or Unleashed Customer Code; and
• a value, such as HT-HOUSE-250 or 5012345000017.

A single record can hold many identifiers. Your House Blend Product might carry its SKU, two barcodes and the code Greenleaf uses for it. A Party might carry a GLN, a VAT number and the customer code it has in Unleashed.

What happens when a Document arrives

Supply Lens works through the same steps for every Document that carries lines and parties:

1. Cross-reference. Supply Lens takes each value on the Document (a SKU on a line, a GLN for the buyer, a warehouse code) and looks for the record that carries a matching identifier. A SKU becomes a Product; a GLN becomes a Party.
2. Enrichment. Supply Lens fills in what the sender left out, using your defaults. For example, if a line has no unit of measure, enrichment works out which unit it should be.
3. Repeat if needed. Enrichment can reveal something new to match (say, it fills in the customer from the ship-to address), so the two steps loop until nothing more changes.
4. Send. Once everything is matched, your Mappings run and the data goes to its destination in the format that system expects.

The same identifiers work in the other direction too. When Supply Lens sends an order into Unleashed, it looks up the identifier Unleashed needs for each Product and Party, and puts that value in the outgoing data.

Seeing the result on a Document

When you open a Document, a green tick appears beside each party and each line that was matched to one of your records. Click the tick to go straight to the record it matched. If a ship-to address matched both a Party and a Location, you can choose which to open.

A missing tick is your first clue that something on the Document is not recognised.

Why Supply Lens won't guess

Sometimes two different records claim the same code with the same scope, for example two Products that both carry the SKU WIDGET. On an incoming Document, Supply Lens treats that as an ambiguous match: it reports an error naming both records rather than picking one. That is the safe choice. You will learn how to avoid ambiguity, and how Supply Lens chooses between identifiers when several legitimately apply, in the Products module.