Vendor Catalog & Imports
Vendor Catalog is another extension for Pimics.
It allows to control and manage incoming data from vendors and suppliers. This module also contains items, but they are independent of your standard Business Central items. However, there is a process to move items from Vendor Catalog to your items and later on to your sales and marketing channels. We call this process item activation. Our customers use a couple of import types to get data into Vendor Catalog. See the topic Import to get more about these possibilities.
Tip
The Vendor Catalog contains similar data as Pimics does. But it should be used just for control of importing data. All product management should be done in Pimics modules like Product Information Management, Classifications, and Publications. There is better functionality to handle all the requirements of managing rich data.
One of the important topics of Vendor Catalog is to make a mapping between incoming data and your data. Because you can get the same product from two different suppliers you need to merge it into one. In this case, you will have two items (or more) in the Vendor Catalog. Another topic is that not all data is good enough to use it. All of these topics are handled during Item Activation.
Related tasks
The following table outlines related tasks.
| To... | Go to ... |
|---|---|
| Manage of vendor items | Manage Imports and Items |
| Select and activate items to BC items | Activate Vendor Items |
| We have a new supplier who give us Excel file | You need to create Partner, Mapping for the Excel and finaly import data using the wizard |
| We have a new supplier who give us XML file | You need to create Partner, Mapping for the XML and finaly import data using the wizard |
| We need to import BMECat with ETIM classification | First we need import ETIM classification and then you can import BMECat file |