Compnay wide maintenance of vender and customer data

Bucky78

Our vendor and customer tables are setup to be company wide. I mean that there is one table for all companies that use Navision. we would like to keep it this because this has advantages for reporting purposes. Some fields are set up to be company dependend for VAT reasons.

Still a lot of vendors and customers are created twice or even more, so we would like to make one person within the organization responsible for the creation and adaptation of the company wide fields.

Has anyone good experiences wit for example info path forms that can be filled out and then approved by one person and then automatically imported in navision?

Alex_Chow

Well, you're on the right track. Most companies request programmers to program internal logic to prevent duplicates. However, this is one of those instances where internal policy is the best solution.

If you're implementing this process, you can setup so a customer has to summit a credit application or send you their reseller's certificate.

But in the end, just train the user to search before insert.

jlandeen

Another option that I have seen proposed in the past is to restrict who can update or insert records into the customer/vendor tables.

Then build a simple new form/table to handle a new customer request. Anyone can have access to this form and it could be hooked up easily to an info path or any form. The purpose of this form is for a user to enter in the key customer information without affecting the "valid" data. Then a small set of users can be properly trained to review this information and only insert customers in correct scenarios (i.e. follow proper company policies) on a daily, hourly or when ever basis.

fl

Common problem. The solution to 'share' the customers and vendors table over all the companies (data per company=no) is part of my solution also. But I mostely start by disabling F3 button for vendor and customer cards. I just want users to create contacts. By this process, Navision can allready look for duplicate records (standard functionality of contacts). After this, you can create customer or vendor directly from this contact card. I even did create a wizard one time to enter a contact, so that it was easy to add businuess rules concerning obligated fields.

DenSter

The problem that I see of sharing master data across companies is the uncommon fields, and subsidiary tables. a price for a certain item for company A may not be the right price for the other company. What happens when someone in company A changes the standard Unit of Measure, which could completely screw up company B. There's just too much that can go wrong this way.

When I worked with a customer we created a solution where there was a copy of the master tables that was global, and the each company could copy that to their own local table. That solution would provide global data, and still give each company the freedom to have their own control over their data.

So for instance, each company would still have their own Item table, and there would be a 'Global Item' table. The only way to create a new Item was to copy it form the Global Item table. Global Items were managed by one person or team, and this would then provide for enterprise wide, cross company numbering schemes for most master data, so it was easy to report on customer/vendor, etc, while still giving each individual company the ability to have control over their own local setup, such as VAT set up vs Sales Tax set up, prices, cost, units of measure, things like that.