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Glossary

Unit of measure

A unit of measure is the quantity basis a line is expressed in — each, box, carton, per hundred, per thousand, feet, pounds — and it determines how many physical pieces an order line represents.

Also written
UOM

UOM tokens are short, overloaded and inconsistently used. C, M, BX, CT, EA, FT, LB and dozens of site-specific variants appear on customer documents with no guarantee they mean what your ERP means by the same token.

Some conversions are impossible rather than merely unknown. Feet is a length and each is a count; there is no general conversion between them without knowing the item's length per piece. A system that produces a number anyway has invented one.

Why it matters on an order desk

FrontBeacon blocks a line whose unit cannot be converted rather than defaulting it. An unknown UOM is a question, not a value.

Related terms

Accuracy snapshot

See what it does to your own purchase orders first.

Send 1525 redacted purchase orders. In 3–5 days you get back what matched, what did not, and why — with every extracted field shown beside the original page. No integration, no ERP access, no workflow change, and no charge.