A Material can be defined as the goods that a company procures and stores, or produces and sells. In Pando, the record of materials can be created and maintained under the Materials Master in the Data Manager.
Materials in Pando have significance in the following areas:
In Manage, where trucking costs will be calculated based on SKU/Material units shipped
In Optima, where the material properties are used as inputs for auto-creating indents
In Pay, where invoices are calculated based on material properties, shortages, and damages.
Product workflow
Accessing Materials in Pando
To access the list of all materials in Pando, go to 
> Data Manager and select Materials from the drop down. This brings up the list of all Materials that are currently available on your Pando account.
Creating a Material in Pando
Pando enables shippers to create materials in one of the following ways:
Individually
In Bulk
Through Integrations
Individually:
To create a Material individually, click the Add button and provide relevant details. Once you’ve added the relevant details, click . This creates the Material record.
To understand details about all fields that are covered under material, check the Field glossary at the end of the article.
Bulk:
You can create material in bulk by uploading them in an .xlsx file. Click the UPLOAD dropdown and download the Sample format file. This file contains all the fields— mandatory and optional— in the format that needs to be uploaded. Add the material fields values to this file and upload it back to Pando by clicking Bulk Upload and selecting the updated file.
Once the upload is completed, you will be presented with the Success notification that indicates the completion of the operation and the number of materials that have been created and the ones that have been rejected.
To identify the files that have failed and to understand the reason behind their failure, click 
. This downloads the rejection list. The rejection list file contains the reason for rejection of a record. Fix the reason behind the import failure and upload the file back to Pando to finish uploading all material into Pando.
Through Integrations:
While Pando allows you to create Material records both individually and in bulk, in businesses such as FMCG, the volume of materials created and maintained can be in high volumes. Hence, businesses (or, in this case, Shippers) prefer to create an integration between Pando and their ERP so that their entire repository of materials are fetched on Pando automatically.
This can be implemented by setting up an API call between Pando and the ERP.
COMMAND | POST |
Endpoint URL | https://<domain.name>pando.in/inbound/api/masters/material |
Payload |
{ "data": [ { "code": "X-15-AL ", "name": "INCONEL", "bu": "", "division": "10", "piece_box": "3", "box_length": "63.800", "box_width": "32.100", "box_height": "22.500", "box_weight": "13.644", "box_volume": "0.542", "gst_exempt": "false" } ] } |
|
NOTE: The fields mentioned here are mandatory fields in Pando. All these field values have to be sent as a part of the API payload to create a record. When a value on any of these fields are missed, the record creation will fail. |
This means, whenever a new material is created in the ERP, if an integration is set in place, the ERP will trigger an API push that will create the same Consignee on Pando as well.
API triggers can also be used to update existing Consignee records on Pando from the Shipper’s ERP.
Field Glossary
Field
(Fields marked * are mandatory)
| Description | Field Format | Mapped To Module/Feature |
Material Code | The identifier code by which the material is referred to in your business/company. Material Codes can vary from company to company. Please ensure that the value added is unique as non-unique material codes will be rejected. | Alphanumeric | |
Name | The generic or brand name by which your material is usually referred to by | Alphanumeric |
|
Business Unit | The name of the segment or subsidiary under which makes or handles this material. This is to mainly segregate the materials/SKUs at a business unit level to aid with the freight provision and planning.
Example:
In the Auto spare parts industry, the Materials/SKUs are split into 2 wheeler, 4 wheeler business unit which are mentioned against the respective materials. | Alphanumeric |
|
PCE Per Box * | PCE- pieces
The maximum number of pieces of material that can be packaged into a box.
Box dimensions may vary from company to company
Example : If an SKU / product is a case with 10 pieces in it, PCE per box of this product would be 10 or if it is a single piece by itself the PCE per box can be set as 1. | Number | |
Length * | The length of the material.
[In Centimeters (cm)] | Number | |
Width * | The width of the material
[In Centimeters (cm)] | Number | |
Height * | The height of the material
[In Centimeters (cm)] | Number | |
Weight * | The weight of the material
[In Kilograms (kg)] | Number | |
Volume | When a unit of measurement of the material/product is in Liters, the Vol within a single piece is maintained in this field in order to calculate shortage and damage with the unit price considering the shortage/damage is reported in liters.
[Measured in cubic feet (cft)] | Number | |
Volume per piece | Only used for fluids
Used to calculate or optimize loading when the material is a fluid. For example: if chemicals, diary, spirits or gasoline is being transported, the transportation can happen in bulk via barrels or kegs. In such a scenario, volume per piece may be used. | Number | |
Category
(Material Category) | Provide a name to the material category. This is to help aggregate different materials under a category that can used for prioritization in Optima.
Optima Category | Alphanumeric | |
Division | Is a field where material/SKU/product division is maintained if there are any. | Alphanumeric |
|
GST Exempt | Choose whether the material is exempt under GST | Checkbox | |
Pallets | Number of SKUs required to make a single pallet. | Number | |
Brand | The brand under which the material has been housed.
For example: Tide | Alphanumeric |
|
Sub-brand | The sub-brand under which the material has been housed.
For example: Tide pods | Alphanumeric |
|
Thickness | The thickness of the material. This field is relevant only for the piping industry where pipe thickness would have an impact in packing and shipping. | Number | |
Load Sequence | The sequence in which the material has to be loaded in order to maximize space utilization. This is field is relevant only for the piping industry where the order in which the materials are loaded would impact how much material can be loaded effectively | Number | |
Can Telescope | Select whether the material can be loaded telescopically. i.e can smaller pipes be slid into larger pipes while loading in order to maximize the number of pipes that can be transported. This field is relevant only for the piping industry. | Checkbox | |
