Turn per-company GP item masters into shared products and legal-entity released products, and convert item and class posting overrides into an item-group design the posting crosswalk can rely on.
Product and item modelling in a GP programme is a moderate-effort domain sitting between two heavier ones. It depends on organisational modelling for the legal-entity dispositions and it feeds the posting crosswalk with the item-group design. Neither of those neighbours will wait for it, which is why it is worth sequencing deliberately.
A GP item that trades in three company databases therefore becomes one product with three releases. That is more work than a row copy, and it buys something specific: a single answer to "is this the same part?" that survives across entities, plus per-entity freedom on the behaviour that genuinely varies.
Posting intent — which accounts transactions for these items land on; Default field values — settings applied when a new item is created; Reporting classification — the way the business groups items for analysis.
The posting rule that dominates this domain is the SOP customer-versus-item selector. It decides whether sales revenue and cost of goods sold follow the item or the customer, and it is rated high collapse risk precisely because the target's inventory posting is item-group-driven.
Three areas map structurally well and still need confirmation, because each affects amounts rather than descriptions.
The dependency-ordered wave plan places products and inventory foundation after finance foundation and party master data, and before open sales and purchase documents. That ordering reflects real dependencies rather than convenience:
The item-to-product mapping shape and the class-splitting method are supported by the source material. The following are not, and are validation items for every engagement:
A GP item master becomes a shared product plus a released product per trading legal entity — a composite mapping, not a row copy. Identity across previously isolated companies is a business decision with a named owner. Matching generates proposals; people make decisions.