Most schools\trusts will allow their staff to raise purchase requisition requests for products from one or more Education supplier catalogue(s). These catalogues contain thousands of records each and currently to give the end user the ability to select any given product from the catalogue the product must exist in Sage 200 Education. To put this into perspective, if you were to import the 2018 catalogues for the three main education suppliers you would have somewhere in the region of 60,000 products in your Sage 200 database. In the majority of cases less than a few hundred of these items are likely to ever be used. This is likely to contribute to performance degradation, as well as the complexity of navigation and reporting of products. When new catalogues are issued, new product are likely to be added and some products are likely to be removed – the new ones could be imported but the products that have been removed would either have to be just left on the system (this will allow user to select them when they are no longer valid and depending on numbers of new items could cause further performance degradation) or manually delete one by one (which could be very time consuming). I propose that we use the API to read the required stock catalogues (either integrating with the supplier's websites or via the csv catalogue files) at the point of requisition entry and write the selected products into the Sage data when the requisition is saved (if they do not already exist). This will mean that the system will only contain the products that have been requested or used, as opposed to the current approach which is to contain any product that could potentially be requested.
Christopher Hall
