Products Overview
In any logistics system, products must be selected or identified. It gets procured and received, transported, delivered, and distributed. All facilities interfacing with customers need to store certain quantity of stocks for future needs. In a word, product creation is a prerequisite for any logistics management activity to be tracked in CommTrack.
Products can be concrete things like essential medicines, humanitarian aid materials, or less conventional products like payments as long as it follows the routine supply chain.
Initial Setup
You can create products manually or using bulk upload tool.
Go to Setup page > Manage Products, and create your inventory.
Option 1: Create products manually
Click 'New Product' and fill in required information as displayed in the screenshot below. SMS code is the product identifier that CommTrack system recognizes and processes. This is also especially important when mobile users are submitting stock status of multiple products in one SMS report.
Products coming from different source or serving different purposes are categorized into different programs. If all products in your CommTrack system are of the same type, you can just keep it as Default.
Learn more about how to create a program
Option 2: Create products in bulk
You could also bulk import your products by clicking 'Bulk Import Products'. Download your product data file (in csv format) and fill in names, codes, and costs (if it is part of your use case) for your products.
Upload it and go back to Manage Products screen. You should be able to see the uploaded products.
Though you could associate products with specific facilities, we currently do not support syncing products to specific facilities. This means when a mobile user in facility A opens CommTrack app, he would see all registered products though he is only associated with a few of them.
That said, the feature of associating products with locations is coming soon!
Successful logistics systems are all characterized by appropriate product availability in constantly changing circumstances. Data and information on the quantity of goods distributed or consumed by customers is important for supervisors to make logistics decisions.
CommTrack system could provide an estimate of actual consumption rate of products at different locations when mobile users submit real data for more than three months. But before that happens, setting up default consumption values for your products will be needed as a proxy for CommTrack to come up with estimates.