How are different branded part numbers handled?

PIESCentral supports multiple brands for the same physical part. Auto Care maintains a “Parent/Supplier/Brand” table that lists brands for each manufacturer. PIESCentral refers to the brands in the “Parent/Supplier/Brand” as “Primary Brands”. Each physical part has just one “Primary Brand”. In addition to the “Primary Brand” it may be necessary to support “Private Label” brands for particular trading partners.

PIESCentral can import just one brand at a time. Each import script is associated with a particular brand. The “Primary Brand” must be imported first, followed by any “trading partner” (also known as “Private Label”) brands.

Part information that relates directly to the physical part such as part attributes, interchanges, kits composition is shared by all brands and can only be imported with the “Primary Brand”. Other part information is, however, brand specific and can be loaded separately for each brand.

For export, a single PIES xml file can contain just a single brand.

To setup Brands, choose Maintain/Brands … from the main menu. Add all of your company’s “Primary” brands and all “Private Label” brands you will need to support. For your “Primary” brands select the appropriate “AAIA Brand”.

More Details. There is a relationship between primary brand part and trading partner part. Each part is uniquely identified by two IDs. One is a Physical Part ID (PID) and the other is a Brand ID.

When you create a primary brand script we create one Physical Part ID (PID) for each part in the source. With a trading partner brand script, we don’t create any new PIDs. Instead we look up the PID for the Primary Brand and use that.

That’s why you can have only one trading partner part for each primary brand part. The combination of PID and BrandID is the key on the Part table and has to be unique.