Deleting Unused Products Using Product Table Export

To bulk delete Unused / Obsolete Product Codes:

1. Do a Product Integrity Check
2. Export all Products to Excel
3. Delete all columns other than Code, Grp, Instock, Lastin, Lastout, Alloc, iconorder, border and poonorder.
4. Sort by these columns and delete all products that have stock quantities or movement dates in the fields in above.
5. Delete all columns except Code and Grp
6. In Grp column replace all with ZZDELETE and save as csv file
7. Create the new ZZDELETE Product Group in the live data set
8. Create a Product import routine with Code and Group only.
9. Backup data.
10. Import the CSV file
11. Check Products then run a test report on movements for the ZZDELETE Product Group to make sure nothing with any transactions has slipped through and amend where necessary.
12. Install Bulk Product Delete By Group utility
13. Delete all products for the Group ZZDELETE (Note this may take a number of hours to run through so do at the end of the day)

For older Versions of Excel With Cap of 65,000 lines

If using an old version of excel which has a cap of 65,000 lines then

1. Move the products tables to an empty data set ie: demo
2. In command mode delete all products with instock <> 0
3. Delete all products where “lastin” and “lastout” are not empty ie: Delete for !empty(lastin)
4. Delete all products where “alloc” is not empty
5. Delete all products where “iconorder” and poonorder” are not empty
6. Delete all products where “border” is not empty
7. Still in command mode – set talk on
8. Still in command mode – count
9. Note number of records.
10. If still in excess of 65,000 then check the names of product groups and pick a group name midway in the range – for example if the group names are alpha then group names starting with K is about half way.
11. Then count for grp<”K” and check number of records. If less than 65,000 then copy to ***.xls xls for grp<”K” and repeat procedure for grp>”J”. If the counts still exceed 65,000 then break the group ranges into smaller sizes.
12. Once all products have been exported to excel files execute steps “c” through to “k” above.