Hello,
We have a customer that requires us to print the Item’s spec number on their invoice so their accounts payable people can tie the item to a specific version/spec/price. We do this by appending the four digit spec number to each of their Items:
ITEMNUMBER-XXXX where XXXX represents the spec number.
When the customer requests a spec number change, we rename the item:
ITEMNUMBER-XXXX becomes ITEMNUMBER-YYYY.
Renaming obviously wipes out any history and is a very odd way to track the spec change. The items are manufactured via production orders.
Are Item variants are a cleaner approach to solving this requirement? We do not currently use variants and we are not sure of the ramification of using them.
Thanks,
Doug
You can use the other field Item No.2 avaliable in item master for spec.
You could either use the Variants (which I would prefer) or the lot number funtionality.
Both of these would be taken into the invoices/item ledger entries/value entries for later analysis.
When using the variant option you just need to make sure that the system does not allow posting without variants (Do the test in the codeunits for Sales Release and Item Post.
Using the “No. 2” field would also be possible but would require that you extend a lot of tables and add a lot of code to take this information through the complete system.
Thanks Thomas,
I will present both the variant and lot number options to my operations group.
Most likely we’ll go with the variant option since we’re already using lot #’s for those Items.
Does the test look something like this:
IF (variants exist for this item) THEN
IF (variant is empty) THEN ERROR
Thanks again,
Doug
Exactly that is the way to do it.
Personally I’m using an “Exist” type flow field on the item table to see (and show to the user) that there are variants with the item in the list.
Then you can even catch the “OnPush” event and show the list of the variants in an easier way than calling “Item” button followed by “Variant” option.