Our implementation team has been told we can configure multiple vendors for an item. I’ve also read about using cross references for indicating similar items with one or more vendor.
Our consultant suggests we use a generic item for office supplies. something like “Office Supplies” or possibly less general like “Pens” so we don’t have so very many items on our list. We are currently at 3,000 non-stock items.
While we aren’t terribly interested in tracking office supplies, but we are concerned with our Purchasing staff having to manually type the details into a purchase order for everything they order. If the items aren’t spelled out, they have to relate the specs for the item (vendor part #, description, price, UOM, etc.) somehow.
In an effort to consolidate but spell out the items we order frequently, I played with making an item named “PAPER.LETTER” and taking the 5-10 versions of that paper size and adding them to cross reference with different descriptions. I also added the two vendors we use for those versions.
What is troubling is that I can’t figure out how to see the various non-default items/vendors when entering a request, requisition or purchase order. It’s pretty easy to pick the PAPER.LETTER item from the list, but why is their no subordinate lookup for vendors or cross reference parts? I’m able to click on the link to the item I picked and find the alternate vendor or part number from the non-stock record, but I can’t seem to change it in the request. I can change in manually on the PO, but it’s a multi-step process. It seems unnecessarily difficult to do what I want.
Unfortunately, the requestor/requisitioner will not always know the vendor/vendor part # for whatever item they are requesting so the information would have to be something the purchaser can choose or otherwise type into the PO. There is also difficulty making the description of the alternate item show up on the PO. I found I could add the description to the end of the item number to make it show up but that seems like a crappy work around.
Any advice would be greatly appreciated.