5 vital grouping options you must have in a uniform program

An Employee Uniform Program is perhaps one of the handiest and most productive tools to be made for manufacturers and distributors in the uniform industry who cater to thousands of employees of an organization.    

However, not all uniform programs are designed equally to meet all the requirements. What sets a great uniform program apart from the rest of the ones is the flexibility to form different groups based on a set of different company requirements.   

What are groups in a uniform program and what are its advantages?  

Uniform program groups or grouping options are the different groups you can create and assign to a particular employee. 

If you’re a B2B seller who provides uniforms to a large organization, you might already know how perplexing the whole process can get.   

In such cases, forming different employees, products, or even shipping locations into different groups and assigning rules to them can essentially do away with the complexities of the process.   

Doing so will allow employees from a certain group to view only those products that are assigned to them.  

Creating such groups can provide you with numerous functional benefits like:  

- Simplifying the process of assigning employees to specific groups.  

And the benefits can go on and on.    

If you deal with the uniform requirements of huge organizations, then you need to be aware of the 5 vital grouping options that are a must-have for any efficient uniform program. 

1. Employee Groups  
2. Product Groups  
3. Payment Groups  
4. Approval Groups  
5. Shipping Groups  

In order to explain all of these grouping options, let’s consider an example of a uniform program created for a huge airline organization. However, do note that the same rules and principals apply to other industries like hospitality, healthcare, army, and others.   

Employee Groups

An Employee Group is a group of employees related to a specific designation or work level.   

Different employee groups in the airline industry include pilot, cabin crew, ground staff, ticketing agent, and so on.   

By creating employee groups,  you’re ensuring that employees can view uniforms or accessories that are assigned to their group only.   

For example, when a member of a cabin crew logs into your website, he/she will be able to view only the uniforms that are assigned to that designation (job role).   

This feature is absolutely essential for uniform programs that are made for the airline industry and armed forces like the Army or Navy.  

Product Groups 

Product groups are the grouping together of different products that you may want to assign to a particular employee.   

For example, you may have hundreds of varieties or categories of uniforms that caters to employees of an airline.   

If you are to assign the uniforms of a cabin crew member to that particular employee group in a hassle-free way, you must create a product group.   

This product group will include all the uniforms and accessories pertaining to cabin crew members, which you can then assign to a specific employee. This way, you can assign a product group to a particular employee or to all the employees of that group by importing a file with the complete list.  

Payment Groups 

In Payment Groups, you assign different types of payment options an employee can use at the time of checking out. The payment options you can combine in a payment group are:  

- Allowance  
- Company pay  
- Payroll deduct  
- Personal or business credit cards  
- Points  
- Purchase order  
- Store credit  

Let’s say, you want a cabin crew member to purchase a uniform using either an allowance or a payroll deduct option or if you want to give a pilot different payment options like a business credit card or company pay.   

So, you create two payment groups, one consisting of an allowance and payroll deduct and another with a business credit card and company pay. You can then assign these payment groups to relevant employees.   

Approval Groups  

Approval Groups are crucial when you deal with organizations that have an Hierarchical Approval system.   

If a particular employee would like to purchase a specific number of uniforms or select a specific mode of payment, you can set up an approval system to allow a higher-up of that employee to either approve or reject the request.   

Now, in the case of a hierarchical approval system, there might be multiple approvers and at different levels. You can group these approvers at different levels and assign them to a particular employee accordingly.   

Shipping Groups

Shipping Groups are important when the employees of an organization are scattered across different parts of a country or region.   

Let’s consider an organization that has employees across the USA and Canada for this. Now the shipping location and settings differ for both these countries. In addition to that, the shipping settings also differ between regions in the USA.   

In this case, you can create different shipping groups consisting of regions or locations that have the same shipping settings and assign those shipping groups to employees.   

When an employee from a specific location, say the Midwest region in the U.S. places an order, the shipping settings with specific shipping rates and methods will be applicable to him/her.   

While these are the five most important grouping options you need in an employee uniform program, a great uniform program will let you customize these and more in different ways for a truly personalized solution.