It is the thing an incoming order line has to resolve against. A customer writes 'hex cap 1/2-13 x 2 GR5 ZP' and something has to decide which of your item-master records that is, or that it is ambiguous between two.
Item masters accumulate history. Superseded SKUs, near-duplicate records from a past acquisition, and descriptions written by different people across two decades are normal, and they are exactly what makes automated matching hard in a way that a clean demo catalog never shows.
Related terms
- Order entry automationOrder entry automation is software that removes the manual keying step between a received customer order and the order record in an ERP, typically by extracting the document, matching its lines to catalog items, and producing a reviewed order.
- Customer part number cross-referenceA customer part number cross-reference maps the identifier a specific customer uses for an item to the seller's own SKU, so that customer's orders resolve without a person translating them each time.