Customization CR1206
Lot Number Suffix by Receipt
Description of Need:
ACME can receive multiple receipts of the same Lot Number over a period of time. They need to be able to select Lots for use in Manufacturing by the order of receipt so that the first received is consumed first.
The Lot Master table tracks a “receipt date”, but that records the date on which the lot hits a “site” in GP—so if a Lot is transferred between sites it gets a new “receipt date”.
The Lot Attribute table only has one Attribute Record per Lot Number, so multiple receipts of the same Lot Number would all use the same Lot Attribute record, making it impossible to record separate a “receipt date” in the Lot Attributes for each receipt of a Lot Number.
ACME manually creates PO Receipts in Dynamics GP (they are not imported or created by a WMS system). They enter the Manufacturers Lot Number in the Purchase Lot Number Entry window (they do NOT auto-generate Lot Numbers). ACME looked at their historical data and found that at most they had received 10 receipts of the same Lot Number, and that the longest lot number was 16-characters.
Description of Solution:
After entering the Manufacturer’s Lot Number in the Purchasing Lot Number Entry window, the customization will add a suffix to the Lot Number that denotes the “number of receipts” of that Lot Number. This will be added as a suffix in the format of “+nn”.
nn = 01 to 99. In the event there are more than 99 receipts, nn will become alphanumeric, starting with A1, then A2 up to A9, then B1 to B9, and so on. This allows for a total of 333 receipts of a single lot number. In the event that more receipts are needed, the suffix will stay at Z9.
The suffix separator is “+” because it is (1) recognized by the scanners ACME uses, and (2) is not used in any current Lot Numbers or as a special character by the scanners.
The suffix will cause multiple receipts of the same Lot Number to be unique (i.e. AHGL-01, AHGL-02), so that each one has its own Lot Attribute record. This will allow ACME to record the actual Date of Receipt in the attributes. Additionally, the suffix will cause the Lots to sort in order of date of receipt so that no changes are needed in the Lot Selection windows to identify which receipt of a Lot came before another receipt of the same Lot.
Since the Lot Number field can store 20 characters, the suffix above will work for Lot Numbers up to 17 characters. If a Lot Number is longer than 17 characters, the customization will not make any change to the Lot Number and will NOT provide any alert or warning to the user.
ACME discussed internally how to handle existing lot numbers and decided that those would be left as-is and that the customization would only apply to new receipts. This may mean that the “first” suffix on a receipt is larger than +01. If there have already been four receipts, the first suffix would be +05.
WilloWare discussed with ACME the other locations where Lot Numbers can be entered (such as an Inventory Adjustment). ACME decided that the PO Receipt is the only location where this control is needed.
Assumptions/Requirements:
- The functionality described above will not work with eConnect, any software that uses eConnect, or any software that directly writes to, updates, or deletes from SQL tables.
- The functionality described above is intended for the GP Desktop client.
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