Inventory/Products Catalogue and Dashboards

Davide Laghi

I would like to set up a professional-looking Inventory/Products Catalogue using a Dashboard populated from an inventory availability sheet that also has product pictures attached to each sheet line/SKU, quality test results, etc.

Is there an established best practice for doing this with Smartsheet Dashboards?

Andrée Starå

Hi @Davide Laghi

I hope you're well and safe!

How many products can there be?

I hope that helps!

Be safe and have a fantastic weekend!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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Davide Laghi

Hi Andree, with this particular organization about 60, give or take...

Davide Laghi

Hi Andree,

Coincidentally, you have come up several times on another search these days linked to this query.

I am trying to put together a Sales Order Entry solution also using a Form for Sales Reps to enter Customer Orders.

The Order typically has the Customer and Delivery Contact Information first and then, of course, you need to enter the Product Details (i.e. Item, Quantity, Price). Our Reps typically submit 30 - 40 products per order.

Obviously, our Reps would refuse to re-enter the header information 30 - 40 times; but also, Reps would like to enter all 40 products on the same Form together, review them first, make changes if needed, and then click submit. The Form would submit 40 Lines in one entry.

I've seen your answers several times in here about using 2 Forms or 1 Form using Conditional Logic.

I understand submitting a Customer Header Form and reloading to another Product Details Form or embedding a second Form URL in a Field description (also combined with Conditional Logic). But still, here we are in the territory of using 2 Forms. And the second Form would still have to be submitted 40 times in a row, one at a time (still not acceptable for our Reps). Plus there is the problem of synchronicity and records linking (especially when you have many Reps working simultaneously) between the header form and the subsequent and separate 40 line submissions. And finally, I guess this would not be particularly user friendly on Mobile, which is the whole purpose for Reps to use Forms on the road on the Customer site.

Did you really find a solution to do this in ONE Form with Conditional Logic, which submits multiple lines in one single form entry together with the header information entered only once?

Genevieve P.

Hi @Davide Laghi

If you're looking to submit 30-40 rows at once, I would actually suggest having your Reps work directly within a Sheet instead of using a form.

A Form will create one row at a time, as you've noted. While there are ways to copy rows back and forth to duplicate submissions, this would not be scalable for 30 rows.

Instead, I would suggest setting up a Sheet as the "form" for them to fill out. Then once the rows are saved in this sheet, you can move those rows over to another Inventory sheet, giving the Rep a blank "form" to work with the next time they have data to enter.

See: Automatically move or copy rows between sheets

Cheers,

Genevieve

Davide Laghi

Thank you for the suggestion Genevieve, truly appreciate it!

The tip to log the data in a landing sheet and then automatically copy rows over to a master order sheet (ie multiple reps consolidated) is indeed very useful.

For the sake of the community, I am going to summarize my draft solution so far:

As we have let's say around 15 active SKUs with about ten sub-SKUs (ie colour/flavour) max, I chose a compromised solution: rows for SKUs and columns for colours/flavours (which allows you to choose what colours/flavours to order for each SKU order form submission). Typically, a customer orders 5-6 SKUs choosing 6-7 colours/flavours per SKU from a catalogue.

I then decided to use a Dashboard as the main Reps' tool, to include: A Customer Header Form at the top (ie customer details, delivery details, etc). Then below that, on the left, I put a menu of available to purchase (ATP) sub-SKUs (pre-filtered reports) with the corresponding Product Order Details Form on the right of each SKU block. And finally, I added an order landing sheet (in the form of a report) at the bottom so that each Rep can see their order lines showing up as they submit the forms above.

I have one last question now: as I have the colours/flavours info in columns, but I also need it in rows in a separate sheet in a single colour/flavour column (ie list of values) side by side with the SKU column for a sheet download at the very end of the process and an ERP CSV automatic order details upload, is there a way to copy the columns over as rows into another sheet?