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Codes must be logically understandable. For example, to sell cosmetics from different brands, a cascade chart for the information to be presented has to be prepared. Begin by taking the biggest set of information about your item first – in this case, ‘Cosmetics’ – and call it set ‘C’. Then you look at the next most relevant subset, for example, ‘Lipsticks’. Let us call that set ‘L’. Then you ask, what brand does this lipstick belong to? What colour is it? And so on. It is probable, that a typical SKU for pink, Revlon lipsticks - in this case - would look like == CL-REV-PNK-001. Keep adding attributes till you can uniquely identify that particular lipstick in your warehouse using only the code. Stop adding the questions as soon as this unique identification is possible.
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Even if an operations person in the retail organization forgets a SKU, he can always deduce it from this method! |
Fonts and Characters
Beware of confusing characters like – O (letter 'O') and 0 (number zero), I (uppercase letter 'I')and l (lowercase letter 'l'), etc. It might seem insignificant, but the font used to print the codes may confuse the reader. Use bold, serif fonts that clearly define most characters without confusion. Avoid using symbols in SKU codes. Excel may auto format the numbers, confusing them with a date if special characters like the front slash (/) are used to create breaks within the code. Other characters like $ and @ are too confusing and can cause formatting errors.
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