Q: What does MU and BU mean? What is the difference between them?
A: MU = Metro Units = selling units, reflecting how Metro sells the articles in stores, at shelf (e.g. piece, bottle, kg, etc.)
BU = Buying Units, reflecting how Metro buys the articles from suppliers and which is sometimes different from MU
Example 1: Metro buys from a Supplier wine cartons containing 6 bottles/each but sells these bottles individually in stores. The cartons are BUs, the bottles are MUs.
The Supplier's Invoice mention the number of crates, while Metro's Goods Received (GR) indicates both the number of cartons and the number of bottles (i.e. 100 cartons on Invoice = 600 bottles on GR).
Example 2: Metro buys from a Supplier fruits in crates of 10 kg, each crate containing 10 bags of 1 kg/each. But Metro will sell these fruits by bag (10 crates = 100 bags = 100 kg).
The crates are BUs, the bags are the MUs.
As you can see in the above examples, MU is not be the same as BU.