Friday, October 16, 2009

Definition: stock keeping unit (SKU)

Stock keeping unit (SKU):
"Warehousing item that is unique because of some characteristic (such as brand, size, color, model) and must be stored and accounted for separate from other items. Every SKU is assigned a unique identification number (inventory or stock number) which is often the same as (or is tied to) the item's EAN or UPC."
Source: BusinessDictionary.com

In the picture below you can notice in the inventory window SKU.Image source

9 comments:

saadia tahir said...

SKU's usage is rooted in data management, enabling the company to systematically track their inventory or product availability, such as in warehouses and retail outlets.
furthermore,SKUs are not always associated with actual physical items, but are more appropriately billable entities.

Rana Aqeel Akhtar said...

Inventory control count that represents one or more items that will be sold together. For example, a retail bed store would consider one bed frame with four wheels equal to one SKU (even though the frame and the wheels come from different suppliers), because a frame is never sold without wheels, and wheels are never sold alone. Conversely, a frame, a box spring, and a mattress would be considered three SKUs, because any of the three items might be sold separately.
source: www.answers.com

bilal hanif said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
bilal hanif said...

Example SKU systems
an item may be a can of a certain soft drink with an item identifier number of 1234.It is packed 20 to a box, and the box is marked with the same part number 1234. The box is then placed in the warehouse.The box of cans is the stock keeping unit (SKU), because it is the stocked item. Even though the part numbers are interchangeable to mean either a can or a box of cans,the box of cans is the stocked unit.There may be three different colors of cans;each of these colors will be a separate SKU. When the product is shipped, there may be 50 boxes of the blue cans, 100 boxes of the red cans, and 70 boxes of the yellow cans shipped. That would be a shipment of 220 boxes, across three SKUs that may be designated 1234B, 1234R, and 1234Y.

Taha Saeed said...

STOCK KEEPING UNIT MEAN?

A store's or catalog's product and service identification code, often portrayed as a machine-readable bar code that helps the item to be tracked for inventory. A stock keeping unit (SKU) does not need to be assigned to physical products in inventory. Often, SKUs are applied to intangible, but billable products, such as units of repair time or warranties. For this reason, a SKU can be thought of as a code assigned to a supplier's billable entities.

SKU EXPLAINED:
SKUs are used by suppliers within their data management systems, to help track amounts of product in inventory, and/or units of billable entities sold. SKUs help suppliers be able to track efficiently, the numbers of individual variants of products/services sold or remaining in stock. They are not to be confused with the model number of a product, although model numbers and attributes are often included to form all or some of a SKU.

FAIZAN said...

Each item type which are stored in a warehouse is known as stock keeping unit(SKU).The SKU uniquely identifies that item type.The inventory records of the storage facility maintain a count of the quantities of each SKU that are in storage. e.g of SKU is that they are used in automation, production system and computer integrated manufacturing.

Faizaan Ali said...

To give a succint summary of what and SKU is, it stands for stock keeping unit and it is usually an item code given to a product for identification purposes and to track the inventory

naima said...

Warehouses mostly use SKU's to track items moving in and and out.It can be a difficult task for them to track each item especially if there are large numbers of products with unique SKU of each.Recent advances in technology in the areas of storage mediums,warehouse control systems and handling metods have simplified data acquisition.This has also removed time,cost ,labour and espacially human errors through manual systems

M. Umer Toor said...

Faizaan said; "To give a succint summary of what and SKU is, it stands for stock keeping unit and it is usually an item code given to a product for identification purposes and to track the inventory"

It surely suffices