Item Substitutions

Fisherman · 2007-02-07

Question for the gurus -

On the Item Card, Sales button, there's a "Substitutions" option, which opens the Item Substitution window. There's a field called "Condition" which indicates whether a condition is associated with the substitution...

Problem is - the documentation on the Conditions is nil. What do the conditions do? What is the format? Can someone give me an example?

ara3n · 2007-02-07

I looked into it and the field is a flowfield that sees if there any record in substitution condition table.

From What I can tell it is not used anywhere. It is pretty much a useless feature.

nunomaia · 2007-02-07

It’s just a check, to inform that there is a comment with the conditions to apply that substitution.

from ara3n

From What I can tell it is not used anywhere. It is pretty much a useless feature

ara3n · 2007-02-07

They could have just added a text field. that could be used for comments.

themave · 2007-02-07

ara3n wrote:

They could have just added a text field. that could be used for comments.

We use it sometimes, and have since version 2. in a sales order when you click on the item subsitution window and see the parts that are subs, the check box shows if there are conditions, and you can click the condition button on the form and read what they are, it is only a text field and not enforced anywhere, but still useful, because you can put as many notes as you need to describe the condition, if it was just a small text field you would be limited to what you could say. There was no bigtext available in older versions, and so I believe they made it a separate table, so as to not limit it's usefulness.

ara3n · 2007-02-07

blob was still available. Usually Navision doesn't add things like that to the application. It leaves that to NSC to decide.
I'm curious what items you substitute, and what kind of comments you put in there. How often do you substitute?

Fisherman · 2007-02-07

I see the "Condition" check box. What I'm seeing is the actual condition text - but you're saying that this is only text to inform the user why we would substitute?

themave · 2007-02-07

ara3n wrote:

blob was still available. Usually Navision doesn't add things like that to the application. It leaves that to NSC to decide.
I'm curious what items you substitute, and what kind of comments you put in there. How often do you substitute?

we are in the heavy truck equipment parts and service business,

a genuine manufacture part number for a u-joint used in a driveline is Spicer 5-280x, for this part we have four substitutions, one is actually made by Spicer with a different part number that they market to a different customer base at different pricing, it is called a DT5-280x, to sell it to certain customers they need to meet certain requirements, so we list those requirements in the conditions table, so new employees can read them.

now the other 3 substitute parts are after market parts that are comparable. and substitute with the genuine part, but not under all cases, we listed those exceptions in the condition table.

We also rebuild transmissions, and some parts can be substituted depending on which transmission they are going into. it depends on tolerances of the transmissions. Over the years we have developed a large knowledge base on which substitutions work best. this gives use an advantage because we know when we can use a cheap part and when we have to use the expensive genuine part.

as far as how often, all day every day across 7 stores.

now most of our parts guys know the conditions, so they don't get read has often, but for new guys it is a must.

ara3n · 2007-02-07

Thanks for the info.
It would be nice if endusers would write about how they use navision in their business. Usually in mibuso you hear about, how do you solve this problem or how do u solve this problem, users don't usually talk about what solution they used to solve a problem, and how well it worked out for them.

Are you using service management for rebuilding transmission, or just sales order?

themave · 2007-02-07

ara3n wrote:

Thanks for the info.
It would be nice if endusers would write about how they use navision in their business.

Are you using service management for rebuilding transmission, or just sales order?

for rebuilding transmissions, we had our solution center write a small change for our us, basically it is a form with a header where we entry the item number of the transmission we are building, and the detail is the parts and resources we put into it. When it is posted, they routine, make a positive adjustment for the item in the header, at a cost of the sum of the items in the detail lines. and a negative adjustment for each item, thus inventory value stays the same, since the parts that are negative, or overset by the part that was built. The resource entries get charge to a cost account.

We looked at the service management but it was too complicated for our needs. the sales order does all we need. For jobs where we are repairing a customer transmission, we do it all on a sales order. simply entering parts and resources used. We added a small routine, that if we check a box in the header designating it a work order, then when it is posted, it prints a summary invoice, instead of a regular invoice. the summary, just prints a description and a total of parts and labor but no detail

ara3n · 2007-02-07

I'm guessing Kitting in 5.0 would serve the same purpose.
If only they could add a question/answer functionality in there so that based on question answered the components would be added.
There are so many companies out there that customers call and you have to build the item based on components.

Fisherman · 2007-02-08

Thanks, guys.

I'm asking because of one of the lines that we run. We package materials, and send out the finished good. We're carrying the item as a purchase item, and the packaged item as another item. If we don't have the packaging materials, however, it's deemed to be not our fault (the suppliers are in charge of making sure that they're there), and we ship the purchase item.

What I want to do is use substitutions to either replace the production item with the purchase one (which Navision will do), or supplement the line with a second one that contains the difference. I guess I can't do that out of the box, though. Time to write a mod.

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