Pools (short for Inventory Pools) in Mercury's Inventory Management primarily serve the purpose of organization, access control, and assignment of Inventories, Buy Items and Proposals.
Functions and Purposes of Pools
Pools enable efficient management and structuring of Proposal data:
- Proposal Organization: They sort and group Proposals. This can be done, for example, by departments, companies, categories (e.g., Search, Social, Programmatic), or other criteria.
- Access Control (Read/Write): Pools control which users have read and/or write permissions for the Proposals contained within them.
- Read: Users with read permission can only view Proposals.
- Write: Users with write permission are allowed to create and edit Proposals in this Pool.
- Data Assignment: Assigning Proposals to Pools helps with the subsequent structuring of data in reports and dashboards.
- Intercompany Proposals: By linking a Pool to a Company, Intercompany Proposals can be created. This allows one team (Company A) to provide a Proposal to another team (Company B) before it is assigned to the end customer.
Pool-Specific Configurations
Pools offer additional control options for data quality and security:
- Non-Changeable Attributes: In the Pool, you can define which Attributes in the Proposals of this Pool may no longer be changed (e.g., booking volume or targeting description). This prevents even the Inventory Manager from overwriting these Attributes and thus ensures data integrity.