Creating Retail Product Assortments

Products are assigned to Stores by creating what are called Retail Product Assortments. Assortments have two purposes. Firstly they are a grouping of products that you are going to sell, and their second role is to associate the products with Retail Channels that say what Stores they are to be sold in.

NOTE: This is part of the Setting Up A Retail Store With POS blueprint series where we show how to configure the retail module within Dynamics AX, and then deploy out the Point Of Sale registers for capturing sales. If you want to see all of the other posts in this series, click here.

How to do it…

To create a retail product assortment, follow these steps:

1. Click on the Assortments menu item from the Common group of the Retail Area page.
2. This will open up the Assortments maintenance form. To create a new Assortment, click on the Assortment button in the New group of the Assortments ribbon bar.
   
3. If you are not already in edit mode, then click on the Edit button in the Maintain group of the Assortments ribbon bar. Then give your new assortment record an Assortment ID, and Name.
   
4. Then we want to assign our Assortment to one or more Retail Channels. To do that, click on the Add line button in the Retail channels section of the record.
5. This will open up the Retail Organization Hierarchy browser. You can select stores individually and add them to the Assortment by selecting them and clicking on the Add >> button, or you can assign stores to the Assortment by selecting their Business Unit. In this example we will save time, and just assign this assortment to all of the Stores that are in our parent Business Unit. This way, as we add more stores, then we can simply add them to the Business Unit, and then they will automatically be assigned to the Assortment.
   
6. Now we need to assign products to our assortment. We do this much the same way that we did with the Retail Channels by select the Add line button in the Products section of the record.
7. This will open up the Retail Product Category browser. We can add any node that we like and add it to the assortment.
   
   In this example we will save time, and just assign this assortment to all of the Stores that are in our parent Business Unit. This way, as we add more stores, then we can simply add them to the Business Unit, and then they will automatically be assigned to the Assortment.
   
8. Now we need to assign products to our assortment. We do this much the same way that we did with the Retail Channels by select the Add line button in the Products section of the record.
9. This will open up the Retail Product Category browser. We can add any node that we like and add it to the assortment.
   
10. One last thing to do here on the Assortment is to set an Effective Date.
    
11. Once all of the products and stores have been associated with our Assortment, click on the Close button to save and publish your Assortment.

How It Works…

If you want to double check your setup, click on the View assortment products button from the Inquiries group of the Assortments ribbon bar.

This will show you all of the products that are part of the Assortment. In the Fact Boxes you should also see that the products are associated with a Retail Channel and also a Product Assortment.

If you don’t see anything here, then you have probably forgotten to set an Effective Date on the Assortment.