Does Navision as standard support catchweight items? We need to place orders against suppliers in, for example, KG’s, but could then receive either in KG’s or EACH’s. Ideally, we would need the abililty to enter either/or in quantity received fields on the purchase order. I have a feeling this is going to require some bespokeing. TIA
Hi The UOM of each item has a conversion between different UOM’s, and you can set a default Inventory UOM, and a different purchasing UOM. The receipt can then be processed in a different UOM from the stocking UOM. The UOM can then be altered on the line if the PO is open and had nothing received against it. You will of course have to tell Navision which UOM you are booking in [:D]
Hi Steve, Thanks for the reply. The wording in my initial posting is incorrect. Let me start again. In the food industry, there is often a need to record two UOM’s when booking in receipts e.g a quantity and a weight. It is this ability that appears to be absent in Navision.
Hi Skippy. Well a standard relationship exists between the weight and quantitiy in Navision as defined by the base UOM and the weight on the item card. This means if the item weighs 1 KG and I receive 10 in the receipt will have a weight of 10KG. However for your requirement you will need to modify the system. You may find a solution already exists in this vertical, contact Microsoft for the add-on’s list if you like, but you will probably find the simplest method is to modify the system to do exactly what you want it to. Sorry [:(]
Hi again The problem we will have is that stock needs to be reported on in terms of quantities and weight e.g 15 gammons = 75KG, but there is not a fixed correlation between a gammon and its weight, in that each item received will vary, hence both will need to be recorded upon receipt. Thanks for the help anyway. I’ll get in touch with Microsoft for the Add-on list. Suspect we’re going to have to look at the mod route though. Thanks for the help.
This is not an easy modification to make. Every place where item quantities are entered you must allow for the entry of a weight. This is all over the system - item journal lines, sales lines (quantity, quantity to ship, quantity to invoice), purchase lines, tracking lines, etc. Also, you probably need to cost and price the items by weight which involves additional modifications to the pricing and costing functions within Navision.
I used to work in the food industry as well…I’m an ex Scrivner, Roundy’s and Fleming person. I clearly understand your problem. Of course, being that you’re in the UK those names may mean nothing. For the other Navision people out there that have used serialized inventory (which I have not), couldn’t this problem be solved using serial numbers for the inventory in question?
Hi Crazy Bean Counter. I do not believe you could use serial numbers to allow the capturing of both the weight and quantitiy of an item that are unrelated. Care you expand on your train of thought? I also agree with Jack. If you need to record both unrelated entries maybe it would be better to have an unrealted weight field from the standard one to allow this funcitonality, but I digress, and not being a devleoper I am standing on the toes of those more qualified [:D] I suggest you request a solution in the developer forum, describing the need to capture unrelated weights and quantities throughout the system.
My last idea wouldn’t work becuase you’re billing the weight not the qty… How about another approach. Set up a unit of measure for every possible weight and inventory them that way… So if you looked at your stock you may see 10 20LB, 5 22LB AND 3 25LB. As far as receiving, I know e-receive from Lanham Assoc. would handle this scenario. Might make it difficult to pick though…when you fill orders do you fill them by weight or units?
Hi all, thanks for all the input. It looks like development is going to be the route we have to go down. I’ll raise another post in that forum at some point. I kind of anticipated Jack’s comment that “This is not an easy modification to make”. I’m just curious about the comment that additional modifications would “probably (be needed) to cost and price the items by weight”. Surely the standard functions would happily cope with weight based UOM’s? Thanks again
Hi Skippy Not to be Jacks voice, but I believe he is saying if you want to process by weight, then do you want your pricing and cost by weight, instead of a quantity, as standard.
This has been done many times. Look at the fish farming industry where sales OUM is box but Price UOM is weight (Kg). The extra processing will require modification is a limited number of tables and codeunits. BUT what about the reporting requirements in the G/L and Inventory; what about interfaces to the processing machinery?
We obviously need to consider exactly what it is we’re trying to achieve. It may well be that we can make postings to the GL using the base uom, eg KG’s, and just worry about visibility of the secondary UOM with regard to Inventory and Sales/Purchases. If this was the case, perhaps, we could just create an additional table associated with the Item Ledger entry to hold the details for the secondary uom against each transaction and then display and update this information as required? Jonathon, I presume from your comments you have prior experience on this issue in the fish farming (or similar) industry. I’d be extremely interested in any further information/comments regarding approaches you have taken to resolving this. Thanks again
Hi SkippyKGS, Navision Version 4.00 is going to have Inventory Dimensions added in as a standard feature. Understand from the release note that one can set up dimensions for inventory similar to that of the GL Entries. That should make your requirement easier as you can have such secondary UOM’s like weight as a dimension added into the Item Ledger and Value entries. This solution would ofcourse depend on whether this is for a customisation on an implementation already carried out or whether it is for a new project. Cheers,
Just noticed the last posting referring to Location Dimensions in Inventory. Is this definitely included? I’m still waiting for my V4 disk from MBS and am struggling to find relevent information on Partner Source Thanks
Hi Skippy https://mbs.microsoft.com/partnersource_uk/productssolutions/navision.htm Look at the 4.0 docs
quote:
New Reporting Features for Day-to-Day Analysis and Decisions Three new features for reporting, Analysis Reports, Sales and Purchase Budgets and Analysis views by Dimensions are ideal for smaller companies with simple reporting needs. These are companies with few concurrent users that work with data of limited complexity. Now, they can create their own reports right within Microsoft Navision, working in the familiar user interface they are used to. • Be flexible with your analysis views: Microsoft Navision helps decision-makers in small companies compensate for their lack of dedicated people to consolidate information for them. Analysis reports enables users to create customized reports based on records of their posted transactions, for example, sales, purchases, transfers and inventory adjustments. In a customizable report, the source data, which is derived from the item ledger (with associated value entries), can be combined, compared and presented in meaningful user-defined ways. In this sense, the analysis report is very similar to a PivotTable report in Microsoft Excel. For example, customers can create a personalized report that focuses on their key accounts in terms of total turnover both in amounts and quantities sold, gross profit and gross profit percentage during the current month, and have it compare those figures with the results from previous months or the same month last year, and calculate deviations. All this can be done in one and the same view, with the possibility to navigate to the cause of identified problem areas by drilling down to the level of individual transactions. • Trace quickly to the cause of the problem: When customers spot a problem, for example, declining turnover, they can quickly find out why. Once they do this, they will then be able to drill down to the cause of the problem in order to make the necessary decisions. • Analyze data in real-time: Customers get their needed views without leaving the familiar Microsoft Navision user interface. As many decisions are made on a daily basis, the information used for those decisions has to be real time. Your important data doesn’t get lost as it’s all in one system. • Support sales and purchasing budgeting and budget follow-up in monetary values and quantities: Sales and purchasing budgeting is a manual process for companies in our target market. The sales manager can use Sales and Purchase Budgets to get the necessary historical foundation in order to make a sales budget. This cannot only be done in terms of monetary values, but, even more importantly, in quantities as well.
I’ve just received and installed my new copy of Navision V4. There is a new tab on the inventory setup card titled Dimensions. However, I presume this is used soley for reporting/analysis, as I can’t see any new fields on the Item Ledger Entry or Purchase Line tables. Is it possible that the functionality Rohith Kamath mentioned previously is a localised mod that doesn’t exist in the GB release?
Rohith was referring to the dimension analysis by inventiry, as opposed to the traditional GL analysis. This is available in 4.0 - whether it assists you with your requirement will be up to your interpretation of the functionality. Essentially though it is analysis from an inventory perspective - I do not see this directly helping you with your requirement, but maybe Rohith was referring to viewing rather than transacting on these UOM differences.
I was hoping that this would give me dimensions at a transactional level but it appears no. I’ll start looking at the development route again. Thanks for all the help anyway
Well you do get the global dimensions on the item ledger entry table, but then you always had that! I believe this is just a way of analysing the transactions.