What Units of Measure are
Lesson 10 of 24 5 min read
A quantity means nothing without its unit. Learn what Units of Measure and conversions are, who needs them, and why they are switched off until you turn them on.
"Three House Blend." Three bags? Three cases of six? Three pallets? Get it wrong and you either ship a customer 15 bags short or send them 51 bags they didn't order. This lesson explains the idea behind Units of Measure in Supply Lens, before you set them up in the next few lessons.
Units of Measure
A Unit of Measure (often shortened to UOM) is the standard way a quantity of a product is counted or priced: pieces, kilograms, litres, bags, boxes, cases, pallets, even hours. Units give everyone in a business, and across a supply chain, a shared language for how much.
Supply Lens lets you use any code from UN/CEFACT Recommendation 21, an international list of standard codes for packages and units. If you need a unit that isn't available, Support can arrange for it to be added.
Conversions
A conversion translates a quantity from one unit into an equivalent quantity in another: cases to bags, pallets to cases, kilograms to grams. Conversions matter whenever different parts of your business, or different trading partners, count in different units.
In Supply Lens, conversions live on each Product, because pack sizes differ from product to product. One coffee might come six bags to a case, another twelve.
Who needs Units of Measure?
You need them if any two of your systems or partners count the same product differently, for example:
- your web shop sells single items but a wholesaler orders by the case;
- a supplier invoices in kilograms but you stock in bags;
- a 3PL counts in pallets for inbound deliveries and in units for picking.
Procurement, supply chain and operations teams often receive data in different units from different suppliers, regions or systems. Conversions let that data be normalised and compared accurately.
Off until you turn them on
Unit of Measure checks are disabled by default. Once you configure Units of Measure on your organisation, Supply Lens adds an extra cross-referencing step to every order it receives, to resolve units and conversions for the Products on it.
That extra step is valuable when you need it and pure overhead when you don't. If none of your partners count differently, Supply Lens recommends leaving Units of Measure unconfigured.
Does Hilltop need Units of Measure?
Before Greenleaf, every Hilltop order was for single bags, so Priya left Units of Measure off. Greenleaf orders cases of six, Brookside counts stock in bags, and Shopify sells bags. Now two units are in play for the same Product, so Priya decides it is time to turn them on.
Turn them on deliberately
Once Units of Measure are configured, an order line in a pack size that has no conversion on the Product will fail rather than flow through. Plan your conversions before you switch on, and test with a few orders. The Fixing master data errors module covers this error in detail.
Recap
- A Unit of Measure is how a quantity is counted or priced; you can use any UN/CEFACT Recommendation 21 code.
- A conversion translates between units, such as 1 case = 6 bags, and lives on each Product.
- You need Units of Measure when systems or partners count the same product differently.
- They are off by default, and configuring them adds a checking step to every order.
- Plan conversions before switching on, because a missing conversion will stop an order.
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