United Stationers Monthly Price Plan Update

Effective Jan. 1, 2009, United Stationers makes monthly update files available to O/PUS a few days before the 1st of each month.

Within 2 business days, O/PUS will upload the following files to the O/PUS PSN:

• All price plans and catalogs that United Stationers assigns to multiple dealers. This does not include dealer-specific price plans.
• A monthly changes-only update file that contains only the items that have price changes since the last update (one month ago). This file uses the UNI-??? naming convention:

  UNI-JAN UNI-FEB UNI-MAR

  UNI-APR UNI-MAY UNI-JUN

  UNI-JUL UNI-AUG UNI-SEP

  UNI-OCT UNI-NOV UNI-DEC

ECi Technical Support will then announce the monthly update file availability at the following locations:

• on the ECi DDMS Customer Support Portal.
• on the Recent Announcements / Mass Emails page.
• on the O/PUS Update Notes page.

Dealers may update their systems using one of two methods, either graphical multiloader (UpdateUNI.exe) or text-based (+IFP):

• When using graphical multiloader (UpdateUNI.exe):
• Download UPDATEUNI from PSNControl, if you haven't already done so this quarter.
• When you load this changes-only update file, the loading program looks for each plan in your DDMS inventory, and updates the prices if the plan is found. As this method indicates, this file is an UPDATE ONLY; new records will not be added to your database.
• Each month's UNI-??? file automatically updates all the price plans that you had loaded earlier in the quarter (excluding dealer-specific plans). It does this by looking at your MultiVendor records on each item and seeing what plans are already loaded.
• In the Price Plans page(s) of the multiloader, enter and select the UNI-??? monthly update file for the current month.
• If you load any dealer-specific price plans, you may also want to select them to be reloaded if available. To check file availability on dealer-specific price plans, watch the Transfer List date display, which will indicate when any vendor pricing file was last updated. United Stationers may provide some updated dealer-specific plans at a later date. If your dealer-specific file is not found, ask your United Stationers representative if and when your file has been provided to O/PUS, wait two business days after that date to try again, and if the file is still not found, please complete the O/PUS PSN ‘File Not Found’ (Word .doc) or Adobe Reader PDF form.
• If you previously selected any plan's “Only” box under the CONTRACTS header, you may wish to Select them in order to update the consumer pricing on those contracts.
• If you previously loaded Matrix files, you may wish to Select them in order to update the consumer pricing. For each Matrix filename that you select, you can leave all its parameter boxes the same. (Leave the “Delete Existing (Contract)” box UNCHECKED, since this is a changes-only update.)
• For details about the Graphical procedure, see Load Multiple United Stationers Price Files At Once
  (www.DDMS.com/resources/support/faq/opus/MultiUNIupdate.pdf)
• In the text-based (+IFP) screen:
  • As usual, use PSNControl to download:
    • the U_UNI loading program,
    • the UNI-??? monthly update file,
    • any monthly X#-??? Matrix update file(s) where you wish to update consumer pricing. All United Matrix file names follow the naming convention X1, X2, X3, X4 and X5, and monthly changes-only files will append the three-character month, such as X1-JAN and so on.)
    • any United price plans where you loaded consumer price plans into Contracts Only (and did not load into MultiVendor record).
  • In (+IFP), keep these notes in mind:
    • Enter the same DDMS contract number that you previously created during the quarterly O/PUS load.
    • If prompted to delete the existing contract, type N. Since the changes-only monthly UNI-??? and  X#-??? Matrix files only contain updates to the quarterly files, DO NOT delete the existing contract.
  • For more detailed text-based instructions, see United Stationers Item Update Instructions
    (www.DDMS.com/Resources/Support/faq/opus/pfunited.pdf)