(Advice) Item Category vs Item Catalog Entry

PeopleTools 8.61.09, FS/SCM 9.2.052

We're revising our Item Categories and currently have categories descriptive of the lowest level of things we buy (e.g., "Toilet Paper"), essentially at the lowest level of the UNSPSC code.

One of our users wants us to use item categories to describe the SPECIFIC products we buy - e.g, "8 pack roll of toilet tissue high ply" or instead of gloves "nitril gloves small women with powder."

This seems like the wrong use of item category - which is a "category" of items. If we did what they're suggesting we'd need to some how know in advance what people were buying, force users to pick the right category if they were doing a special request, etc., and would baloon our item categories to a nearly unusable size. We wouldn't be able to automatically apply this category during punchout becuase the supplier would send us a UNSPSC code and we'd have no magic way of turning that into our custom, even more specific category