Product Sources - am i missing something?

I tried to use Product source (created on the fly while placing purchase order).
The problem is, that i have never seen this info again down the pipe :slight_smile:

I have placed PO for two same materials with different quantity: one with the specific source, other without source information. The source info was visible in the PO, but just one step further (while generating shipment) it was not present, i just saw two lines which were identical (minus quantity difference of course). The same while accepting the shipment. I failed to find source information on the stock overview as well.

I may bet i did something wrong because it looks totaly useless like this. How do i enable material source info to show up on every step of inbound, stock overview, outbound processing?

Sorry for the delay, I’ve been offline since last Wednesday (US Thanksgiving holiday). I’ll review and respond to everything else when I get back to work next week.

The short answer is that Product Suppliers are part of the product master data (see Product Sources tab on the Stock Card) and used for Purchasing activities, but not carried through activities like receiving, storage, and shipping. I think it would be interesting to carry that information through but it adds complexity at the transaction level since we’d need to add an extra dimension (Supplier) to each transaction and that info might need to be provided by the user. For now, we should be able to tie inventory items (lot number) back to their origin POs / receipts (supplier) via query if that’s something you need.

My guess is that you just want to see the supplier associated with every inventory item. And again, that’s fairly easy for us to do using an extra join or two but it’s expensive and should be used sparingly.
So let me know where you need this information and I can see if there’s a better way to implement it. Note that this might not handle the case where the same lot number is used for multiple suppliers.

But along these lines, I am planning to add an inbound license plate number (LPN) dimension that could carry the supplier information from the purchase / receipt onward. But note, that this also adds extra work for every transaction as you need to tell us what product, bin, lot and now LPN is involved for all warehouse activity (putaway, picking, packing, etc). Not to mention the added complexity around consolidating and splitting LPNs. So adding this “carry through” effect is not going to be without effort / pain on the user side.

speaking about manufacturer, manufacturer’s part number and supplier, we need to see actual manufacturer`s part behind our part, so it is mostly not about the supplier info.

Actually, if those fields in material master record, which are now marked as deprecated and “soon to be gone”, would be present, searchable and visible on PO, inbound, outbound shipments and in stock overview, it would be enough. Than would mean having separate material for each manufacturer’s part, but that`s ok since they could be linked via associations as alternatives etc.

Very late to the party here. For what it’s worth, we have a roadmap item for a similar use case that we are referring to as “proprietary products” that allows you to specify that a particular product must have a given manufacturer part no, while other products can be from multiple manufacturers. That’s probably a year out at this point.

In the meantime, you could consider a few options (depends on your exact use case)

  • Include the manufacturer part no in the name of the product, assuming that its a proprietary part. You could use a convention like Air filter, for machine # (Manufacturer & part no). If you have a situation where you have multiple manu nos under the same product, you could make each manufacturer part a product and tie them together using associations or product family. This is the only way to carry that info through to inventory and beyond
  • Use sources, and use custom documents + recent improvements in 0.9.3 to view source info in PO, shipment, and receipt. 0.9.3 which will be community released soon has some updates to documents and addition of tooltips to show source info in PO, shipment, and receipt. But custom documents can also be very powerful here. We have a different custom PO doc for every office so that we can show exactly the data we want to suppliers. Warning: They are extremely annoying to create. But they are really powerful because a superuser can make them. Example PO template attached. You can see that it has the additional manufacturer data and also includes some custom if statements relative to our use case. Notethat custom documents actually need to be in ODT format. I uploaded a word doc since the modal wouldnt accept a .odt.

PIH US template.docx (19.0 KB)