When it comes to identifying inventory, an item's unique product code (UPC) is perhaps one of the most reliable means of achieving this goal. Retailers and merchants around the world frequently purchase UPCs in block and then assign these codes to inventory items as needed. These UPCs do not, however, come cheap. Depending on the size of a retailer’s needs, the costs associated with purchasing UPCs can be quite high. For this reason, once stock has been depleted for a given run of goods, many retailers opt to reuse the associated UPC codes.

Conceptually this process works well within retail; however, Retail Pro’s inventory can be configured to define inventory items as unique by its UPCs. This can clearly be a problem when a retailer wishes to reuse a UPC because it has already been assigned as "unique" to a given item in inventory, hence requiring a retailer to purchase more UPCs once they have depleted their previous sets.

This issue has been addressed in the latest version of Retail Pro 9. Now merchants can choose to use global UPCs, local UPCs or any combination of the two.

This is only one of the features added to the latest release of Retail Pro 9. The latest version also contains enhanced serial number tracking and better customer loyalty initiative support.

This entry was posted by Retail Pro on Friday, May 11th, 2012 at 9:32 am .