Item Definition Organization and Reference Organization

An item definition organization is an item organization that stores the item attribute values. A reference organization is an item organization that collects the item attribute values from the item definition organization.

Currently, you have to model every location as an organization. Most of the item attributes are similar within a group of organizations. Typically, all locations within a group have the exact values for the item attributes. For example, if one million items are present in the Item Master, several million records are stored in the database. You create multiple records in the database and most of the data have duplicate records. It increases the time to query a record and it becomes difficult to maintain the database. To avoid this situation, you can model your organizations into two groups, namely item definition organization and reference organization. By doing so, the attribute values of items in the reference organization are derived from the item definition organization. This method reduces the total number of records in the database.

You can define the item definition organization on the Manage Inventory Organization Parameters setup page. You can define the reference organization using the Item Grouping Behavior attribute on the Manage Inventory Organization Parameters setup page.

Benefits of Modeling Definition Organizations

When you model your organizations into definition organizations and reference organizations, you have the following benefits:

Reduction in the data migration time
Reduction in item data volume for large, complex organizations
Reduction in data maintenance effort. Any attribute change to a definition organization is available to all the reference organizations automatically.
Reduction in the number of item rules
Reduction in the data audit effort. You need to audit only the definition organizations.
Improvement in the performance of item query, keyword searches, and transactions for large, complex organizations