Supplier ID missing

[Ann]

Afternoon All

Hope you are all safe and well.  Please would it be possible for some help/advice?  We are currently associating an asset from the service catalogue to a supplier and under the 'Financial Information' section there is a field labelled 'Supplier ID' however this is blank.  However on the list of all asset's there is a column for Supplier ID which is populated but when you go into the asset the supplier ID is empty.  If we try to manually enter anything into the supplier ID the information will not save and there are no drop down lists to select an ID from.  Thank you

Kind Regards

Ann

[Ann]

Morning @AlexTumber

Hope you are well.  Please would it be possible for someone to look at the above post?

Kind Regards

Ann

[AlexTumber]

@Ann thanks for your post.

I'll try and explain the current situation as best I can :-)

The Hornbill Service Manager app comes with a field for storing a supplier id against an asset. This is the field shown in your screenshot. It is a free text field that has no drop down menu.

If you have the Hornbill Supplier Manager app installed on your instance, you have access to the functionality that allows assets (from Service Manager) to be related to suppliers (from Supplier Manager). These relationships are handled by the Supplier Manager application. 

What we recommend is that if you have the Supplier Manager application installed, you go to the configuration section of Assets inside Service Manager and disable/hide the supplier id field from appearing against any assets. This should remove the confusion as the asset/supplier relationships can then be handled in Supplier Manager or on the right hand side of each asset form.

What doesn't help things at the moment is that it's possible to relate the same asset to more than one supplier. Functionality is currently being worked on to enforce that an asset can only be related to one supplier, and will be included in a future Supplier Manager update.

 

Alex

[Frank Reay]

@AlexTumber I have also been very confused by this field. I previously loaded some data into it via the Upload Assets screen (which was clearly a mistake!) but I can't now remove that data either on the individual assets (it's just not possible to edit) or via the CSV upload (that doesn't allow updates to blank or Null). As you suggest I have switched it off in Supplier Manager.

Its very existence has always been a complete mystery to me! I think what you are saying that as we are using Supplier Manager and Service Manager we should just ignore it. But will that cause issues if I have some data in there?

[AlexTumber]

@Frank Reay thanks for your post. 

The data should be removable - if not that's a bug. I'll ask our Service Manager team to investigate.

The supplier id field has no functionality behind it so ignoring it won't create any issues going forward.

Unfortunately this is one of those cases where we haven't managed the evolution of the functionality particularly well.  Assets in Service Manager needed to have a field for storing a supplier id, well before the Supplier Manager app was created/in existence. When we first introduced Supplier Manager, it didn't have any asset functionality so the field was still required, but once the asset functionality was added we should have looked at a way to automatically hide the field in Service Manager and promote the asset - supplier relationship through Supplier Manager.

Alex 

[Frank Reay]

@AlexTumberThanks Alex. Let me know if you want me to raise an incident with screenshots. Data for this field cannot be input on individual assets if 'switched on' (as highlighted by @Ann) and equally it cannot be removed (in the main detail the data doesn't appear and in the right hand side panel it vanishes when you go in to Edit!). And as I say it is not possible to clear down data 'on mass' via the CSV upload route.

[AlexTumber]

@Frank Reay @Ann The Service Manager team have informed me they have fixed the issue with the supplier id field. Apparently it was a simple fix. It will be included as part of the next Service Manager update.

Alex

[Frank Reay]

@AlexTumberThanks Alex.