Products in FlashPro

Standard products that are sold via FlashPro include Stock products and Made to Order(MTO) products.

Every CLS product is identified by a catalog number. From here on, products will be referred to as catalog numbers.

A Key Point:

MTO and stock products are standard products that are manufactured by Cooper Lighting Solutions. Any deviations on these standard products must be requested separately, through a Product Deviation Request (PDR).

Stock Products:

Stock products, simply put, are products that are readily available on the shelf. They have already been made and shipped to the warehouses, where they wait until the orders come in.

Excess Inventory

Excess Inventory are items which are in excess i.e. when the supply exceeds the demand. It is worth noting that only stock products can be in excess, but not MTO.

Made to order:

Made to Order products are products that made by the manufacturing plants after an order is placed, as opposed to keeping a stock products that are ready to be sold. They can be both configurable and non-configurable.

Configurable Products:

Flash allows you to configure certain products - that is, you have the ability to customize the specifications as listed in the product spec sheet. i.e. you get to select each component in a product. For example, you can customize the fixture size, voltage, length, etc, based on the compatibility of each component.

To do this, you make use of a tool called the 'Cincom Configurator'. You can see the Configurator icon, in every Sales Instrument, when you go into the Line Items tab. It's the little 'widget'/'gear' icon.

Generally, when you open a Cincom page and make your selections, it is called manual configuration.

Click here to know how to manually configure an item
A Tip:

Configurator models for stock items are available that allow users to choose a product that is readily available including alternates in the event of out-of-stock or backorder.

Key Points:
  1. For the most part, configured products are MTO, but it is possible to configure something that ends up being a stock product. When this happens, FlashPro recognizes the configured product as a stock product and doesn't show the "CFG" label when the configuration is returned.
  2. Flash is designed to auto configure every line it doesn't recognize in the SI upon saving. So, unless the line contains stock or MTO product with prices or approved products, you can expect to see the 'CFG' label on these lines to indicate auto-configuration.
  3. While the configurator is largely used for configured items, it can also maintain a stock table; in a case where there are no prices maintained for stock products, Flash will try to "configure" this product(so to speak) and will bring back the prices maintained in the configurator's stock table. There is a pre-requisite for this: the stock product must be listed in the table, otherwise the configuration attempt will fail.
  4. While the configurator has all the configurable products, you can find the stock and MTO products using the "Product Search" page.
Auto Configuration

The name sounds super sophisticated and pretty technical when you think about it, but in practice, it's pretty simple. Auto configuration is simply a shortcut for you to skip the process of manually configuring a product - with a caveat: you kinda need to have the catalog number at hand. Why?

Basically, Flash allows you to enter a valid configurable product in the line and configures it for you on save. Take the above manually configured item as an example. We configured it and eventually got the catalog number 4APN6-19/L830-90/L830-120-CD/CD. If at any point, we have the whole catalog number at hand (or we have superhuman memory) we can enter this number directly into the line item and simply save it. There is no need to go into the configurator. Just keep in mind that if you want to auto configure an item, it's not enough to enter the catalog number alone; you need to enter the brand as well. Otherwise, it won't work.

Here's how you can auto configure line items

Quick Ship

Quick ships are simply MTO products that can be shipped, well...quickly. That's it. That's literally it.

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