Best place to store notes and attachments by item number?

XA doesn't lend itself to lengthy notes on service part item numbers and I've asked I.T.to look into solutions and also volunteered to see what service departments in other companies use.

Often, hours of investigation are done on a service part and the resolution ends up in someone's email file on a PC, or in a word document filed who knows where. Sometime later, the same issue is investigated again (the wheel re-invented) because the resolution wasn't stored in a central database and the investigator didn't know there already was a solution in place. Because we have 50,000 service part numbers (roughly just half of them active), I believe we need some type of solution for service parts notes.

Based upon my experience working a help desk, I believe a ticket tracking system (e.g. Track-It) would lend itself to storing notes and resolutions by part number. Since we already use

* RightNow CRM
* Track-It
* Dell Kace K1000
* XA for ERP version 9.0 (green screen, but we're implementing Thru-put...)
* ARI PartSmart

software, I'd like to know if any of you have used one of these for service parts notes, or if you have a recommendation of some other approach. There are also a lot of free tracking system apps out there that may be players.

At the moment, I'm looking for something for internal use, not something to be shared with our customers. It should have the ability to add a record by item number and be able to accept an attachment for the item number record. The simpler the better; as a grand, full scale solution encompassing not only spare parts (item class xx) but production parts that can be used by all XA users (I would think our buyers have similar need) is not what I'm looking for because that would take years.

Thanks in advance.

Bryan Burns
Parts Analyst