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[Tammie Boer]

Hello,

I’ve not found a way to deactivate a released product and I’m curious how other companies manage their product catalog.  How do flag your products so they don’t show in drop downs entering PO’s, invoices, product reports, etc.?

Thanks,

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Tammie Boer
Manager of Business Applications
Command Alkon Incorporated
Birmingham AL
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[Mark Prouty]

?We have a multiple approach:
We include *OBS* in the item name.
We apply a stop for purchasing (and also inventory when stock is depleted), which prevents adding to POs either manually or from firmed planned orders.
We assign an alternate item when available, although the inventory stop interrupts this feature in sales orders. 
We added a field “item life cycle” that displays in BOM lines for visibility, and throws an Infolog warning when checking the BOM.

We still manage to sell one occasionally as circumstances dictate, or find one during physical inventory.

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Mark Prouty
Programmer / Analyst
ANGI Energy Systems
Janesville WI
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[Elliot Finn]

HI Tammie,

We use the Stopped approach Mark mentioned, which can be found in the Released Product default order settings, There is one under each of the tabs and have different effects.

Purchase – prevents it from being used on a purchase order, including invoicing
Inventory – prevents any inventory transactions, including production transactions (including ending Prod order) and being picked for a sales order (removing from inventory)
Sales –  prevents use on a sales order including invoicing.

We find that if something has been ended prematurely we get the finance, dispatch or warehousing teams emailing to ask why, so it pays to be sure there is no stock and the last transactions were in the previous month before applying the respective stops

Cheers

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Elliot Finn
IT Systems Administrator
Dairy Goat Co-operative (NZ) Ltd
Hamilton
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[Tammie Boer]

Hi there,

Thank you for the response.  Does anyone know of a way to remove these “retired” items from the drop down lists such as adding an item to the PO line?  It’s easily becoming messy and too much to sort through.

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Tammie Boer
Manager of Business Applications
Command Alkon Incorporated
Birmingham AL
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[Jon Gosche]

Removing from the drop down list – this is where the renaming with a zzz prefix comes in handy. It can be time-consuming, plus I believe D365 does not allow for this. 

I work a lot with the Release Products module. I have a filter on the ‘Search Name’ !*hide* . Then, as products go by the wayside, I enter ‘hide’ put in this description field. This doesn’t help with the drop downs but it does make my view of the file cleaner.

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Jon Gosche
Manger Distribution Services
Somagen Diagnostics Inc.
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[Andreas Mörker]

Hi Tammie

We use an ISV from Prodware called Lifecycle Family (LCF). 

With this ISV you can define multiple lifecycle families (e.g products, services, etc.)
Within a family, you can define global product states as well as for released products.
By changing the state in the product information management, all released products that have assigned the LCF get updated (e.g blocked for production).
It is not fully serving our needs though.
Out of the box selling without producing and taking returns (for quality reasons) but stop of sales is not possible. Therefore we had to request some customization from our implementation partner. It now works as desired.

Overall I think if you do not have special requirements (like we do) it can also be a great solution but comes with a price also with regards to the one version approach (one more thing to test).

To be honest I’d go with Elliots solution first. If not satisfying, you can still look for an ISV that fits your requirements.

Best
Andreas

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Andreas Mörker
Global Master Data Manager
SIGVARIS
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[Adam Pascoe]

Good morning Tammie;
If we retire or have the need to “delete” an item we also re-name it, with a “zzz_” in front of it to push it to the bottom of any lists.  As well as stopping the product for sales under the Default Order Settings for the released item.

One thing to keep in mind, the current state of D365 does not allow you to rename products/items once transactions exist.  We’re currently on 2012, but this is one of the things that will have to be addressed whenever we move to 365. (This discussion talks about the new “feature” that doesn’t allow us to rename items.)

(Edited to update my poor initial grammar)
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Adam Pascoe
Bio-techne
Minneapolis MN
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[Mark Bailey]

Hi Tammie,

Yes the Stopped checkbox on the default order settings under “Manage Stock” against the item record is the only way to stop transactions for an item.

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Mark Bailey
Application Consultant
Annata
Portsmouth
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[Daniel Zook]

Has anyone figured out how to sell out of an item that you are discontinuing, and automatically prevent the item from being ordered once the total quantity ordered matches the quantity available?  (i.e., don’t allow back orders)

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Daniel Zook
Director of IT
Lehman’s
Dalton OH
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[Mark Prouty]

Setting the purchase block should give buyers pause to order something.

There is the alternate item number feature that prompts to replace the sales line item when entering an item with insufficient on hand.

There are 2 options on the post packing slip  – 1st is to Reduce delivered qty to qty on hand, and 2nd to close the line (= set delivery remainder to 0).
However, how to make this happen programmatically based on a discontinued item is a different problem.

Finally, there is either an alert on the sales line that a deliver remainder exists for an obsolete item, or, a batched report that emails. Ultimately, there is some baby-sitting involved.

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Mark Prouty
Programmer / Analyst
ANGI Energy Systems
Janesville WI
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[Jon Gosche]

I’ve used or use parts of all of these. I stopped renaming to zzz quite a while ago (that’s another story).
All our items have Buyer Groups that show on the Planned Orders screen. I don’t know whether or not this is custom. I have an XXX Buyer Group for items we will no longer purchase. If any pop up on MRP, I’ll investigate why and correct.

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Jon Gosche
Manger Distribution Services
Somagen Diagnostics Inc.
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[Trent Aschliman]

As you can see there are many approaches, I would use the Default order settings to stop the purchase, production, and sale of the item.  You can use the where used to find where the item in question is used on a BOM or Formula and expire it to prevent planning.  To signify the item is not to be used, you can use Property as well on the item to set as Obsolete or Deleted.  Any one of the other ways discussed are a viable option as well, personal preference really.

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Trent Aschliman
McWane, Inc.
Birmingham AL
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[Andrew Lencsak]

Hi Tammie,
What version are you on? D365 introduced a Product lifecycle state that allows users to disable any items from that state from planning as well as tools that can help you mass update items to your “obsolete” state if there have not been transactions for a certain period of time. This does not prevent them from being ordered or showing on dropdowns, you’ll need some combination of the other suggestions referenced in this thread to help with that.

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Andrew Lencsak
Solution Delivery Manager
Arbela Technologies
Irvine CA
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