Service History And UPGRADE to NAV2009

ALyczkowski

We are working on upgrading our Attain 3.60 Database to NAV2009. I was surprised to see that a step in the process is to delete all of our Service History.

How do i explain to my clients that the past 7 years of service data will be lost?

ara3n

Where in the steps does it do this? Thanks.

kine

The problem is, that the module have different structure since version 5. You can try to "transform" the history into new tables, but still you will miss some data to have full and correct history.

ALyczkowski

In prior upgrade projects that i have worked on, Navision and Microsoft provided the tools to transform the data.

Look at the difference in all of the Ledger entry tables in Navision 2.60 to 3.0. The toolkit did the work for us.

I understand that this can be done, but am curious as to why it wasn't. - just ranting.

If you were to do this transformation, what would you look at, I am sure that your knowledge as well as mine can accomplish this.

thanks

Alan

ALyczkowski

Regarding how this topic for discussion started:

While Testing my upgrade, using the Upgrade toolkit, I opened the form 104001 Upgrade Old Version. as instructed, I hit the transfer data button as instructed, and received an error.



I opened the error log and received the following 3 error messages:

There Must not be any Unposted Service Orders/Quiotes in the system - Table 5900

There Must not be any Unposted Sales Invoices (Service)/Cr Memos (Service) - Table 36

There Must not be any posted service order in the system. - Table 5930


Looking at page 42 of the Upgrade toolkit, Appendix A-1 the following message is a precondition for upgrading service:


For the new functionality to work correctly, the database must not contain any unposted service documents (quotes, orders, invoices or credit memos). In addition, Posted Service Order Documents must be deleted because this document type will no longer exist.

kine

Yes, but nothing about "posted" documents like invoices etc. - it means history is still there, but because there are no posted orders in service in new version, you need to delete them because the system is not able to "transfer" them into something else. The posted orders are "mirrored" in other posted documents...

ALyczkowski

The question is what other documents, and does the toolkit do this transformation.

I have over 860,000 Posted service orders, and the majority of my service reporting and analysis is based on the information that is contained in the Posted service orders.

pvar

I worked with ALyczkowski on this upgrade and we are shocked to see the way the upgrade toolkit asked us to delete all the posted and unposted service data from the tables before it can do the conversion. :shock:

We knew the table structure has been changed considerably in 2009 especially on the posted tables. I understand the complexity in moving data from a set of tables to an entirely different set of tables but how can you just simply say to your users that you will loose all that? At the same time toolkit could have transferred the unposted data without much hassle but I am surprised microsoft didn't even attempt for that. [-X

I ripped through the codeunits that does the conversion and I could not find toolkit re-building the history data from any other so called 'mirrored' tables. You simply loose all your service document history once you done with the conversion. Another interesting thing is you still have all your item ledger, value, g/l, service ledger, warranty ledger and res. ledger records of all those deleted posted transactions, I am seeing a data integrity issue here with all those ledger entries with no corresponding documents to support it!! Moreover the toolkit deletes service order log, service order allocation and posted document dimension records as well so if you have some custom reports or something based on that data you are screwed as well. I even checked 2009 SP1 toolkit and it does the same thing too.

I would really like to hear from some one who has done an upgrade to 2009 and experienced this situation.

ara3n

The change to service management was done in 5.0 and this is the process for it. 2009 is no different.

I suggest if you want the history is to renumber the tables to 50K range and keep it as modification. Add the code to keep history of the service order.

The other option is to change your reports to look at different tables that contain the data.

pvar

I still don't know why microsoft didn't put any effort in moving the history to the new data set, no one want this? I do not think the history should be moved as a modification in the 50k range. With some effort I think we could move the history to the base tables itself and direct our reports to look there. Any way the reports need to be changed to look at the new tables.

Alex_Chow

Service management is not developed by Microsoft. They bought the add-on and incorporated into the standard product so there are a lot of features that are lacking, i.e. I wished Service Management integrated with WMS, but it doesn't.

For the upgrade, you would need to write custom code and upgrade it manually like Rashed said.

ara3n

pvar wrote:

I still don't know why microsoft didn't put any effort in moving the history to the new data set, no one want this?

I view it just like when sales orders get deleted once it is fully shipped and invoiced. I'm sure some people would like to see it but majority don't need it and if they do, then sales archiving is used.

There are many things missing from service management. For example the recognition of WIP.
I'm sure MS is working on missing features.