Anchors

This page is for both the facility operator and brand tenants — a shared anchor is the piece every multi-organisation feature in Yessort depends on, whichever side of a shared site you're on.

A shared anchor is one physical product line that several organisations each stock under their own SKU. It's identified by a 14-digit GS1 barcode (GTIN), and every organisation whose variant carries the same barcode can be linked to the same anchor. One organisation creates the anchor; from then on, its display name, GTIN and brand are fixed — an anchor's details can't be changed after creation.

Why it's the foundation

Everything cross-organisation resolves foreign stock through the anchor. Commingled counting at a shared location, supply publishing between trading counterparts, and ownership flips on an intercompany transfer all identify "the same product, someone else's stock" by matching on the anchor — never on SKU, name or barcode alone.

A variant with no anchor is private to its organisation. It has no cross-organisation behaviour at all: it can't be counted alongside another organisation's stock, it never publishes availability to a counterpart, and no other organisation can draw on it.

Who can find an anchor when linking a variant

Browsing Anchors and opening an anchor's own page are curator-only: only the organisation that curates an anchor can list it or open it. Everywhere else, "seeing" an anchor means something narrower — finding it in the search used to link one of your own variants to it.

For that search, an anchor turns up for your organisation if either of two things is true: your organisation shares a site with the anchor's curating organisation — a membership overlap, not necessarily a trading relationship — or your organisation has an active trading relationship with it. An organisation with neither can't find the anchor there at all, even by searching.

Set once, at creation

An anchor's display name, GTIN and brand are set when it's created and stay that way. There's no edit or archive screen for an anchor once it exists, so get the details right when you create one.

To create one, see create an anchor. To put one of your own variants onto an existing anchor, see link a variant to an anchor.