Is anyone aware of a way to systematically prevent special item purchases for specific suppliers?

We are looking to prevent spend slip from preferred suppliers. To do so we are looking for a way to create an error if a user tries to create a special item purchase order or requisition line based on supplier.

If anyone has any ideas, I'd love to hear what you might suggest.

Thank you!

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andy

How do you classify preferred suppliers? You can likely accomplish this with an Action Configuration for the PurchaseOrderLine business class.

unknown

Currently, we don't have any fields indicating whether a supplier/vendor is preferred. We just have the item master with approved items and the approved vendors defined in the Replenishment sources of our item locations.

Do you think an Action Configuration could be used with the Vendor ID and the PurchaseOrderLine classes?

andy

Sorry for the late reply.

There are a few different ways you could probably accomplish this. I think ultimately you want to find the solution that is most manageable. You could for instance add a boolean User Field on the Vendor called "SpecialsNotAllowed", and then add an Action Configuration rule on the Purchase Order Line to Warn / Block when ItemType.Special and Vendor.SpecialsNotAllowed.

However, in doing so you would have to actively flag the Vendors you want to warn / block for Specials, so maintenance could become an issue.

If instead you have a way of logically classifying the Vendors / Items you want to warn / block for specials then less data management is required. That could be tricky depending on how the Special item is being input. I would imagine the user inputting the special may not have the Item number, but instead be inputting a Vendor Item or Manufacturer Number.

You could possibly check against Vendor Item records. I did something like this in the past to check if a Special had an active Vendor Item tied to an Item that was flagged as Purchase Taxable. I believe it required creating a relation from PO line the Vendor Item, but once you have that you could potentially get to the Item, Item Location, Item Replenishment Source, etc. Though keep in mind, adding levels deep relations in an Action Configuration could hamper performance, so you'll want to make sure and test any create / update Action Configurations you add.

Hope that helps.

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