Unique Business Challenges and General Discussion

[mdblack]

we recive excel sheets from our vendors with new pricing.  We need to systematicly update pricing in Mass (cost, retail..).  I am running in to the following issues as i approch this and i was wondering what others were doing:  

The main issue i run into is the Item codes is not the same as the MFG on the excel ,  I have created a UDF for manufaturer part number.   I am wondering what others have done to over come this .

[BigLouie]

Create an Access database in which your Excel file is linked in and the MAS Item Master File is linked in. Then build a query that links on the UDF and the manufacture part number in your file and build an import file. Then import that file.

[SRYork]

Other solutions is to use Alias Items to link the ItemCode master file to your MFG item numbers.  In that way you can actually have an Alias Item record for multiple vendors. 

[SPyle]

We have this problem a lot and 10 years of evolution has brought us to this:

We combined both solutions above. 

I have some access tables that cross link the vendor part number (stored in alias file) back to the item number and then import from an access odbc.  We can't maintain consistancy of the vendor number in different formats (UPC with hyphens, without hyphens, 11 digit, 12 digit.) so we also use the "Routing No." on IM Tab 2.  I back-fill a "standard" vendor part number into this field when I do the imports from alias which has improved import accuracy dramatically.  I always re-run this after the series of vendor imports, which are all linked in the VI module.

To further maintan accuracy of pricing, we have a UDF for "Price Date" which is updated with the import or manually entered when anyone updates pricing.  This indicated which records are not updated and either had bad part numbers or have been dropped by the supplier and need to be deactived/deleted.