Product Specification Family

Product Specification families is a way for you to group together more than one Product Specification record so that it is easier to keep track of all products and to update their specification when necessary. This might be necessary when, for example, you fabricate carton boxes for a customer who has many brands. They will usually request the same box, with the same specifications, but with some minor different details, such as different colors.

To create a family and assign products to it, follow the steps below.

Follow the steps 1 to 3 from the Creating A Product Specification topic. 

Make sure to select the Family check box. This record will be a Product Specification family.

After you complete the required fields, click on Confirm. The system creates the new Product Specification record.

To assign products to the new family, go back to the Product Specification browser and click to edit the record that you want to assign to it.

Click the Link PS button. The Link PS page opens.

You can start writing the family's description in the Family field or click the magnifying glass to look for it.

Save the Product Specification record. It now belongs to a family.

 

Once you link a PS record to a family record, the child will display the Family field as read-only and you can see to which family it belongs in the Family PS field.

It is important to note that, even though belonging to a family means that the Product Specification has several setups in common with the other records that belong to the same family, each record can still have different details. The goal of grouping them in a family is to make it easier to maintain the setups that are the same.

 

Working With The Family

After your family has some child records, this is how you can work with it:

Button	Description
Create Family Items	Select this button to create new child Product Specifications, using the family record's specification.
Apply Changes in Children	Use this button whenever you change something in the family's specification, and you want to apply this change to the Product Specification record(s) assigned to it. For more information, see the following topic.
Apply engineering in the children	Use this button whenever you calculate a new engineering for the family or edit some detail and you want to apply this same Engineering to the Product Specification record(s) assigned to it. The system opens a window, and you can choose to which child Product Specification record(s) you want to apply the Engineering; it is not mandatory to apply to all of them.
Verify linked PS	Click this button to check which are the children Product Specification records related to the family.
Apply Family status in the children	This button allows you to apply the same status of the family record to more than one child record at once.

 

Apply changes in the child records

As mentioned before, the family is a way for you to update the child records at once, without the need to do it one by one. Thus, for that, follow the steps below in the family record:

In the Versions tab, select which version you want to edit and click Edit Specification and/or Engineering. The respective window opens.

Make the necessary changes and Confirm.

Click Save to save the changes in the family record.

Click the Apply Changes in Children or the Apply engineering in children buttons. The Apply Changes page opens.

In the Select the Characteristics that will be applied in Child grid, select the specification changes that you want to apply to all the child records. It is not mandatory to apply all of the changes.

In the Select children specification product to apply engineering grid, select to which record you want to apply the engineering changes.

Note: If a child record has a different Engineering than the family's one, you cannot apply the new Engineering to them.

Click the Apply Selected Characteristics button. The system applies the selected changes to the child records.

 

Family With Versioning

The Family with versioning is an option available for the family records, which triggers some behaviors from the system when you create an Estimate Sales Order.

Disabled: if you use two or more Product Specification records from the same family, the system creates the Estimate or Sales Order with one final product for each PS record.

Enabled: if there are two or more Product Specification records in the same family and the products use the same characteristics, the system creates only one final product. This product will have a version for each PS record.