What's the best practice to manually assign a vendor number to a vendor if the
Best Practice to manually assign vendor number
Answers
000001, 000002, 000003..........
Hi Anon
From my perspective of someone who helped design a global ERP system, who spent 17 years helping clients choose and use ERP systems, I have one simple phrase for your management colleagues:
" Smart numbering isn't, smart names are."
Vendor numbers are codes to uniquely identify the correct vendor record. That is all.
Data management 101.
PS - what ERP system are you using?
Anonymous -
Why would management really care or be involved? With today's ERP systems, finding a vendor/customer can be as easy as starting to type in their name.
Thus if your system auto-numbers, that's great, eliminates possible duplicate numbers (not duplicated customers/vendors, the bane of all systems).
Not back in the old days.... I could see a point.... But we also used rotary phones...
Antiquated thinking.
Anon-another thought
Sometimes there is another dimension to this thinking of user defined numbering when your company does business with many divisions/subsidiaries of a corporation. Often management want to know "how much business do we do with Acme Group?"
The better solution to this (especially when divisions/subsidiaries don't have the same name as Acme) is to be able to define vendor groups. First look to do this in your ERP vendor master record (even as a user defined field). If not then maybe it can become metadata in your data warehouse.