Re: Best place to store notes and attachments by item number?

We use the standard attachments under INFOR XA PowerLink to extra notes,
policies, conditions and item photos.
This makes the information available internally, to users working under
PowerLink. (We use these both with items and with customers.)

In this case we just added a photo, but this could be a WORD document with
extensive history.


................................................................................................

Roger Blocher
Vice President of Information Systems

TECH International
P.O. Box 486
Johnstown, Ohio 43031-0486
P: 740-966-8009
F: 740-966-8090
http://www.tech-international.com



From: "Burns, Bryan" <Bryan_Burns@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
To: "MAPICS-L@xxxxxxxxxxxx" <MAPICS-L@xxxxxxxxxxxx>,
Date: 05/20/2013 09:17 AM
Subject: [MAPICS-L] Best place to store notes and attachments by
item number?
Sent by: mapics-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx



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