Customer Code Manager and Synonyms

Introduction

Pistachio allows your products to be assigned a unique code (i.e, customer specific) for customers who are concerned about purchase confidentiality (i.e, they don't want others to know what flavor or fragrance they are purchasing). Customer codes also help protect your business interests by increasing confidentiality about submissions. Customer code is a customer specific code for a given product submission. Pistachio can be configured to produce Customer codes in one of the following three ways:

1.  Customer Codes can have a global prefix followed by a 5 digit random number
2.  Alternatively, Customer Codes can be generated in a more readable form, for example the code could be formulated by <first word from product>-<customer prefix>-<auto increment number>. Example when submitting a Peach flavor with an internal code of Dev1247 to Customer XYZ corp, it's unique customer code would be "Peach-XYZ-1"  (available when generating the code in a project context)
3.  If the customer dictates their own code to be used, you have the option to type your own customer code.
[Chemicasoft can configure code generation based on your unique needs if the default behaviour is not satisfactory].

Regulation documents such as allergen statements, MSDS, Product specs, etc. can also be generated against customer codes.
If you do not wish to use customer codes and rather submit product codes to your customers, this feature can be omitted.

You also have the choice of a simpler code generation system which enables you to give a different code and/or name to a well known product, but it is not customer specific. This is using synonyms. In this method any product code and name can be specified.  

Accessing customer codes

Customer code manager can be accessed in three different ways:

1. Click on the "Product" menu and select "Customer Codes" as shown in figure 1:

Figure 1

2. Click the "Customer Codes" tab within the Product Database as shown in figure 2:

Figure 2

The figure above shows that the Pista product with code DEV1 and version V1 has two customer codes associated with it, viz, EK025663 and GOLD003466.

3. Click the "Product Submissions" tab from within a Project as shown in figure 3 (Please refer to the Project chapter for more details)

Figure 3

Finding a Customer Code 

The Customer Code Manager accessed via the Product menu (as shown in figure 1) will display the Customer Code database as shown in figure 4:

Figure 4

Users can search on customer or product code and names and also on other fields such as customer name, project names, etc

Creating and Editing customer codes

You can create a new customer code for a product which exists in the product database in the following three ways:

1. Click on the 'Product' menu and select 'Customer Codes' and then clink on the Create New link located at the upper right corner of the customer code screen as shown in figure 5:

Figure 5

Once you click on the 'Create New' link, you will see the 'Create Customer Code' screen as shown in figure 6:

Figure 6

        2. Click on the "Customer Codes" tab within the Product Database and then navigate to the 'Customer Code' sub tab. Clicking on the Create New link located at the upper right corner of the Customer Code screen as shown in figure 7 allows you to create a new customer code for the product:

Figure 7
   
       3. As part of 'Product Submission' within projects. Click on a project to which the product is submitted. Navigate to the 'Product Submissions' tab and click on Add Samples link, abd once you are in the Add Samples edit screen, uncheck the 'auto generate' field if you want to manually generate the customer code as shown in figure 8:

Figure 8

Figure 9 shows an existing customer code opened in the edit mode. The "General" tab shows the various fields available as part of the customer code information while the "Documentation" tab allows the user to generate various regulatory documents using the customer code as the product code:

Figure 9

Customer codes and Project Integration

Generating a customer code from within a project associates the generated code to that project.


Figure 10

In figure 10, 'CUS43667'  is the customer code while the internal product code is FLV0001 version A.
This code was submitted uniquely to 'Customer International Flavor Pvt Ltd' for the application 'Milk'.

Synonym

The difference between a "customer code" and "synonym" is that customer codes are unique and assigned only once to a product while synonyms codes are not unique and can be reused. Also, customer code manger can generate codes automatically while user has to specify a synonym manually.

Uses for Synonyms

• Alternate code and name for the product
• You should be able to generate documents (Product specs, Halal, IFRA, etc) for the desired synonym code from within the "Documentation" tab of a product.
• Synonyms may also be a choice when project integration is not enabled.

Product Synonyms can be accessed in two ways:

1. Click on the "Product" menu and select "Synonyms", or  
2. Open a "Product" and navigate to the "Customer Codes" tab and select "Synonyms" tab.

Synonyms for a product can be created from within a product view. You can specify a code or name to suit your sampling or customer needs. Figure 11 shows how the product Dev1 V1 has the code FF25 assigned and named 'Pure Pista Flavor'.


Figure 11

Security

Only authorized persons can create or view customer codes. Further when using projects, permissions can be configured so that the external agents will be able to view only the customer code but not internal product codes. The 'Generate documents' permission should also be enabled for users to be able to generate documents.
Permissions are configured in the 'Roles' link under the 'General' tab of "Global Options".