We've added a new feature called the Search SIM Catalog to Back Office, which is designed to further streamline the process of adding items to your database from SIM. This feature lets you import items without needing to choose a specific supplier first – you can look across multiple suppliers at the same time to find what you're looking for.
Where to find the Search SIM Catalog feature
The Search SIM Catalog page can be found in the side menu, under SIM (or the lightning bolt icon on smaller screens):
You can also access this feature from the main Items page:
Or you can use it when you want to add new items to a Purchase Order that aren't already in your database:
Using the Search SIM Catalog feature
You can use this feature to search all of your SIM Suppliers at once for an item, or a range of items, by typing in the supplier part code, brand, season, EAN/UPC barcode, or any part of the description into the search bar and clicking on Search SIM:
This search is quite clever – it will look for the search term in all of the fields mentioned above.
The results will appear below – depending on what you typed in and which SIM licenses you have, they'll look something like this:
You can use the wildcard Search bar at the top to search further within these results, or use the column headers to filter the results down further.
If an item is available from multiple suppliers, a result will appear from each supplier, so you can choose which one you'd like to import.
Multiple Suppliers
If an item is available from multiple suppliers, the primary supplier for this item will be taken from whichever result you click Import on in the search results. The other suppliers will be added as secondary suppliers when the item is imported.
Importing an item
When you find the item you're looking for, click on the Import button to the left of the item. In the menu that pops up, choose a Department and Category for this item from the dropdown menu:
N.B. It will also tell you if this item is currently out of stock with this supplier.
You can search for a department and/or category using the search bar at the top of the menu:
Click on the Import button, and within a few moments, you'll get a message like this:
For items that are part of a matrix, it will import all of the child items and the parent item. To see more details of the imported items, click on SIM Import History. Or to go back to the results to add more items, just click OK.
This item will now be available in your Items list.
