How to use the Cross Reference fields in P4P

Question

I have been receiving questions related to the Cross Reference section from many different customers and partners. This post represents my attempt to describe the Cross Reference Section and the Equivalent Numbers stored within.
Identity
A term that Kelly uses and I will borrow is “identity”. A given specification can have many identities. The basic identity is the specification number generated by GSM. This is useful during early stages of design. Once we get past a draft or development status in the workflow the organization quickly wants to identify the specification in other ways. Examples include:
Execution System Number: Operations and Supply Chain quickly need to formalize an item or material for forecasting, inventory and purchasing…
Custom Numbering Conventions: Sometimes an organization has very specific custom logic for identifying materials. Usually terms like smart numbering are used to describe their methods.
Data Migration Identifier: In some cases customers have extensive data clean up projects. As part of the effort systems and processes are developed and an identity is created. In my experience we loaded a “Base Stock” number to represent Packaging Materials. The label stock that was commonly used was historically not represented so we created a number as part of the migration project.
Identity Functionality:
The Fields: The four major fields that make up the Cross Reference section are as follows:
>>System Name: This field describes the system generating the identifier. Examples I like to use are Oracle EBS or SAP Material Master. Sometimes geography must also be concatenated to the system, i.e. Oracle EBS – NA. This occurs when the customer is a large multinational where multiple ERP implementations exist. Therefore the same material may be known by many different numbers, i.e. Oracle EBS – NA = 77432, Oracle EBS – EU = 88883.
>>System Code: The system code is merely the syntax used during integration. Using CSS or various APIs you may chose to identify the system using an abbreviation, EBSNA or SAPMM.
>>Equivalent: The value representing the identity within a given system.
>>Externally Managed: If you are using CSS or an API to receive Cross Reference data you can define the field as "Externally Manged". When a cross reference is marked in this manner the general user community will not be able to edit the field. Administrators associated with the role [Externally_Managed_Cross_Ref_Admin] can edit the field if needed.
Syndication: While some users enter equivalent numbers manually, others use integration tools to generate and transmit identities. If a given cross reference is marked as “Externally Managed” then users are unable to manually enter data. On initial syndication the specification will not have a given equivalent. The specification is sent to middleware, a number is generated by the appropriate system and the response is sent back to GSM to add the System Code to the specification with the appropriate identity value.
Copy verses Issue:
>>Copy: When a user copies a specification the Cross Reference data is NOT included. Since the identities refer to the originating specification it does not make sense to carry over to the copy. If we did then users would quickly need to delete the data.
>>Issue: When a user issues a specification it maintains the Cross Reference data. This is an important concept because it is expected that a system like GSM will have many issues related to a single ERP #. ERP systems are usually not interested in many of the fields stored in the Product Data Management system.
Reference: As raw materials are consumed as inputs into Formulation or Trade Specifications the organization may come to identify the materials based on equivalent numbers. Therefore GSM allows for an equivalent number to appear next to the GSM number.
Implementation Issue:  Ingredients In Packaged Quantities
Some customers run into a situation where the ingredient specification does not represent a packaged quantity. From an R&D perspective the developer does not care if the material comes in a box or a tanker. In this situation the GSM ingredient may be represented in the ERP system by many items and therefore more than one cross reference value. These items represent packaging differences that are important to purchasing, manufacturing, warehousing, and other execution systems.
I hope this helps describe some of the purposes and implementation issues around the Cross Reference field.

Answer 1

You need to get jmf.jar in your CLASSPATH, either on the command line, in an environment variable, by putting a symlink in $JAVA_HOME/lib/ext, whatever works for you. Have you done that? Once it's in the classpath, you can run jmstudio from any directory with the command "java JMStudio".
Items in the bin directory are just shell scripts, run with "sh jmstudio" or whatever suits your shell (on Mac OS X, copy one of these guys and append ".command" to the filename to make him double-clickable in the Finder).
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