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[Ben Giddens]

Hello
I am a Director of Merchandising responsible for maintaining the item master for a wholesale parts distribution company.  We are currently on Dynamics AX 2012. 
What I would like to be able to do is systematically tie our competitor(s) part numbers to ours, so that in the event a customer gives us that information we can complete the transaction in a more timely manner.
We have found a way through External Item Descriptions to store our customer’s part numbers, should the need arise, but that is customer account specific.  Is there a way to leverage that functionality system-wide?
Thanks
Ben

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Ben Giddens
Redneck Trailer Supplies
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[Mac Young]

Ben,
As well as being able to assign the external part number to a specific customer account, you can also apply it to a customer group, which may facilitate applying the part numbers system wide.
(The field is the “Item – customer group” within Sales order defaults on the customer record.)

How are you looking up the competitor part numbers? We have had to introduce a few developments to allow the sales team to reference and/or select by customer part number.
Regards

Mac

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Mac Young
AAF Ltd
Cramlington
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[Ben Giddens]

Mac
Thanks for your response.
Right now competitor part numbers live on spreadsheets completely outside the system.  I will dig into the “item-customer group” settings and see what I can achieve.
Ideally the end result would be to enter the competitor’s part number on an SO line and have the system translate to ours.  This functionality exists on “search name”(we call it a reference number).  Our item number and search name are interchangeable on SO’s.  I’m looking for another field to do that with competitor item numbers.

Thanks
Ben

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Ben Giddens
Redneck Trailer Supplies
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[Mac Young]

Ben,
Add the external part number to your part using a group relation, which is also assigned to your customers.

Select the Item number drop down on the sales order, gives access to the external item number, as a searchable field (this was our dev).

Our modification only gives access to the external item per customer relation, but i’m sure this could be adapted to show the relation per customer group also, as another column maybe.

Hope this helps

Mac

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Mac Young
AAF Ltd
Cramlington
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[Ian Deynzer]

One simple solution is to add the competitor part no into the Item Search name field (and if necessary do a simple mod to increase the field length to say 200). Then you can add anything you want in the search name field in a string without spaces and use “Contains” in the search.

We did this in AX2009 and are doing the same in our upgrade to D365FO. Also very handy if your are forced to restructure your item codes; you can put the old item code in the search name field to aid the transition.

No need to get too clever with workarounds in the config which may trip you up later

Cheers, Ian

 

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Ian Deynzer
CFO
Jacobsen Creative Surfaces
Auckland
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[Colby Gallagher]

Hi Ben, 
  If you have the Retail config keys enabled, you can store competitor info at the Released Product -> Retail tab in ribbon -> Competitor Prices.  More details here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dynamicsax-2012/appuser-itpro/set-up-competitors and you might want to add a field for the Competitor’s item number.  If you are using retail, you could also add this field to the Retail Item Search functionality, and your sales agents could find your item number by keying in the competitor item number. 

If you dont have Retail enabled, you can set up External Codes at the Released Product -> General tab in ribbon -> External Codes.  Create the code “Competitor Item #” or something in the top of the form, then you can assign a value for this code at the bottom of the form.  Once you create the code for one product, it will be available to assign a value to for all products. 

 

?

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Colby Gallagher
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[Ben Giddens]

Hi Colby
We do not currently have Retail enabled.
Regarding External Codes, I have one part number setup as you described. It was very straight forward.
My end goal is to be able to leverage that information when entering Sales Orders, and on Released Products to be able to cross reference parts faster.
Right now we can enter “search name”(which is our Reference Number) on SO’s and AX will change it to our part number. Ideally this is what I would like to achieve with Competitor Item Number information. 
Do you know if the External Codes can somehow be leveraged in a similar way?
Thanks for your response.
Ben

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Ben Giddens
Redneck Trailer Supplies
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[Tony Zeigler]

It is also possible to store external items on a group. Thus, you could make a single group, and add that external item group to all your customers, then add the competitor’s info to that single group.

I haven’t checked if that gets in the way of info you have specific to a customer tho – so you’ll want to check that if you also have external item info specific to customers.

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Tony Zeigler
Senior Consultant
Strategic Solutions NW, LLC
Beaverton OR
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[Ben Giddens]

Tony
Do you have some quick step-by-step instructions on how to create and then add customers to that new item-customer group?
I have access to our Train environment, so I have the ability to see how it all works. This also gives me the ability to check against customer-specific item numbers.
Thanks for you input.
Ben

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Ben Giddens
Redneck Trailer Supplies
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[Tony Zeigler]

I have a D365 environment handy at the moment, but it’s old functionality and shouldn’t have changed much.
Navigate to Form: Sales and Marketing Module, Setup, Items, External item Description
Create new record, such as: Code: COMP, Name: Competitor’s Items
Click the External Item Description menu at the top of the form to navigate to the form that allows you to add rows.

For Customers:
Navigate to the Customers Detail Form.
Navigate to Sales order defaults fasttab.
Populate Item-Customer group field with your code from above: COMP

Downside:
There is no ability, to my knowledge, to search for a product by it’s customer’s item number. So you would need to do a mod for that.
Also, you’ll want to check your customer facing documents to ensure they don’t print the customer item number – because it might be your competitor’s number instead.

I do like Colby’s suggestion if you had retail functionality…

Alternative Idea:
Setup your search criteria for product search (see Sales & Marketing/Setup/Search) to include another field, such as Name Alias, then add your competitor’s item id’s to your item’s name alias field. Then see if your product search will properly pull them back when entering the item id field on a salesline.

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Tony Zeigler
Senior Consultant
Strategic Solutions NW, LLC
Beaverton OR
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