help, solution for apparel industry

davidh

Hi
We are an apparel import/distribute company. Looking for a ERP solution. We need colour-size matrix on the order entry screen, inventry control, invoice. We Just saw a microsoft partner here today. It says the only solution is buy pebble stone together with dynamics nav. And peddle stone is about the same price as Nav per user. This make the whole price too high. Is there any other cheaper solutions at all?
ANy suggestion would be highly appreciated.
thanks
David :?:

Waldo

I've seen the pebble stone solution and the colour-size matrix. It's basically playing around with variants. This is standard Navision.

The pebble stone add-on is very nice and goes very far. You can't have all of it for that price. But that's the question ... will you need ALL of it. If only the colour-size is important, I'm sure an NSC could do some modifications... .

There is also "retailium". An Add On from ACA (also a Dutch company). They have there solution based on Pebble Stone, but with quite many modifications. May be it's interesting to contact them?

Miklos_Hollender

http://download.microsoft.com/download/ ... dd-ons.pdf

mb6606

We developed a comprehensive Nav solution in house for our apparel manufacturing and distribution company. The system is running a fairly large international company over the last 7 years.
The system is state of the art and surpasses any technology that we have seen. We spent well over a million USD to develop. the features are far to numerous to list but feel free to ask any questions.

davidh

But we are in the bottom of the world. I bet we can only find a local partner here to provide the solution. And they only support pebble stone, no other choice. Considering the huge price, we may have to look something else.
Is the price $5,000 (BASIC), $8,000 (ADVANCE) per user sounds reasonable?

ara3n

Wow that is high per user. Who is the NCS?

Waldo

davidh wrote:

But we are in the bottom of the world. I bet we can only find a local partner here to provide the solution. And they only support pebble stone, no other choice. Considering the huge price, we may have to look something else.
Is the price $5,000 (BASIC), $8,000 (ADVANCE) per user sounds reasonable?

imho even 5000 for advance is very high ... .

davidh

The price is two part.
About 60%Nav, 40% pebble stone. It really sounds too high.
Does anybody know what can pebble stone do, what will NAV do?

davidh

can anyone tell me what's the normal price in the states?

MTC

Good lord, that price is out of the gap. I'd look for a partner that can maybe do a modification or two for you if all you need is a simple matrix box. A collegue of mine put something similar together a few weeks ago that has a simple colour size matrix (dynamically adaptable to different sizes and products - shirts, trousers, bags, shoes, etc.). It took him around a week to develop the custom solution. It is quite obviously no comparsion to Pebble Stone, but it fulfills the client's requirements.

Good luck.

David_Cox

A simple cheap solution would be to add a couple of tables Size and Color, with 2 fields Code and "Item No.", so they are Item specific, then extend the Item Variant Table with two new fields, so when you drill down on the variant, you can see the size and color

Black1 ~ 1 ~ Black
Black2 ~ 2 ~ Black
Black3 ~ 3 ~ Black
White1 ~ 1 ~ White
White2 ~ 2 ~ White
White3 ~ 3 ~ White

On the sales order just drill down and select the variant, there is a lot already built into Navision around variants most is already there.

Then just add the new fields to any forms and reports like stock by location etc:

A few days work for any NSC, if you are not expecting to much?

davidh

thanks, David
But on the inventory control part, will the system treat per item-colour-size as an individual object or just one item(include all the size & colours). We need to treat them as a seperate thing to organize the inventory.

David_Cox

davidh wrote:

thanks, David
But on the inventory control part, will the system treat per item-colour-size as an individual object or just one item(include all the size & colours). We need to treat them as a seperate thing to organize the inventory.

David this can be however you want it, you can have one item (Product) with unlimited variants with the added Size and Color, these can be set as variant mandatory on each item, so the user has to select a variant for all inventory movement, with two level analysis by item and variant

Item1~Black1 ~ 1 ~ Black
Item1~Black2 ~ 2 ~ Black
Item1~Black3 ~ 3 ~ Black
Item1~White1 ~ 1 ~ White
Item1~White2 ~ 2 ~ White
Item1~White3 ~ 3 ~ White

or what some retail Companies do is create an item record for each combination, there are several standard group fields you can use as well as dimensions for reporting.

It would be worth having a play with the Cronus database, look at fields like "Item Category Code" and "Product Group Code", see if you can use these and the Dimensions on a standard system.

You may find there is a lot already covered and no need to complicate things any futher.

You can report quantity, cost and sales value per variant as standard, so if I was selling shoes I could set up one Item with all the different Sizes and Colors using variants, then report on the line or a size and color variant, and this is standard with no changes, if I do not want to report all items of a size or color.

davidh

Thank you David
But will the colour-size show on the screen and print on invoice as 2-dimention matrix (some call it grid)?
We are using an old fashion software which has this matrix function currently. Everybody likes this part. We don't want to change to a system doesn't do in this way.

David_Cox

davidh wrote:

Thank you David
But will the colour-size show on the screen and print on invoice as 2-dimention matrix (some call it grid)?
We are using an old fashion software which has this matrix function currently. Everybody likes this part. We don't want to change to a system doesn't do in this way.

Hi David you could pay your NSC to modify the Sales and Purchase Line tables to bring the Size and Color across from the selected Item or Variant, and add them to the forms and reports, it should only be a few days work for a developer to give you a simple workable solution.

Note each variant can also have a different description, which may do what you want at no cost.

If you are sure you need the extra fields then, What is required?
To Create 2 tables and forms, you will need to purchase modules tables and forms.

Add 2 New Fields to the Item and Item Variant Tables editable Yes.

Add 2 New Fields to Sales, Invoice, Shipment, Return, and Credit Lines
Add 2 New Fields to Purchase, Invoice, Shipment, Receipt, and Credit Lines editable No.

Add Code to Sales Line and Purchase Line tables to bring the values across.

Modify Reports and Forms to show the new fields.

Another consideration, is add the fields to Item Journal and Item ledger, then code to carry the values to the Ledgers, in sales post, purchase post and item journal post.

This is a few days work that can be done in Navision, no need for another package, for a simple solution, but if your requrements are champange on a beer budget, then [-o<

:-k If you want to use Warehouse Pick and Put Aways, then there would be a bit more work involved.
David

MTC

I am not familiar with Pebble Stone at all, but does that price quote include all granules or is it just for the functionality that you need? Obviously, you will not need functionality for manufacturing etc.

Waldo

afaik, Pebblestone also works with manufacturing ... indeed good question ... may be those granules are also included in the price.

Miklos_Hollender

I would STRONGLY advise against using the Variants functionality of Navision, either by default or customized like in the case of LS Retail, where Size/Colour/Style fields (and matrixes) are added to Variants.

I did it at project a while ago and what happened that in the end I had to rewrite almost every report to show Items if an given item has no variants, or show Variants if it has, because users want to see Inventory, Sales, Inventory Valuation etc. everything down to Variant level.

Other nasty surprises are that you cannot have f.e. different costs for Variants, only if you also use Stockkeeping Units which are a huge pain in the backside, and I'm not sure that FIFO costs are correct even this way... better forget it and forget it fast.

Rather use some kind of "group item" which can either be an Item or a Product Group as a template for generating size/colour/whatever versions in your custom development, but the generated version should be Items. In this case you have complete control over costs, prices, everything. It's simply safer than checking out each and every functionality in Navision whether it works properly with Variants or not.

Of course having many, many Items has it's drawbacks. What I usually do is to create a new checkmark field called Obsolete or something like that (I don't really like using the Blocked field as it generates inconvenient error messages at stocktaking f.e.) and filter Obsolete Items from the Item List, from Inventory Adjustment etc. - and manually filter from most reports.