Hi Andrew:

Thanks for the list of questions! I'll pass them on and will get answers.. Well, I'll try anyway.;-)
Since I'm not really involved in the day-to-day use of POA or Inventory (or Order Entry, for that matter), I can't answer most of your questions in detail right now. However, from what I know and understand at this point is that our Import department needs to have for two reasons:

1. We currently use Excel spreadsheets with the specifications for every single item we manufacture. That's over 4000. There is a ton of information in each one of those spreadsheets, incl. several photos. Makes for very big spreadsheets. Some of that same information is then reentered into Inventory. Not all of it, since fields like length, width, height are not available in Inventory. The Import department and my boss want to investigate if we can have all the item information in Inventory and eliminate those thousands of spreadsheets.

2. As far as POA is concerned, from what I understand, they need the item dimensions to then calculate the cubic feet or inches (volume) of an item, which would then be multiplied by the number of items (quantity) to give us the total volume for a PO. This information could then be used to figure out how much of a PO can fit into a containers or how many container we would need for an PO. Here's what my boss wrote last night:

"Ok so we aren't using this as a weight proxy as we need both. This
needs to be figured out as it's central to the information flow. We
aren't the only company cubing containers. If this software can't
handle this see if you can find one that does. It needs to pull from
an item list with a fair number of fields and then be able to generate
a pretty straight forward po and have the ability to run subroutines
using variables from the item list. Hope this helps.".

This is all just my understanding as an outsider of what their requirements are. I'll get answers to the questions you have raised and I'll make sure to pass them on to you.

Regards,

Andre