There's several different scenarios where this can be an issue.
Regularly customers have longer Item No's and it is a huge project to undertake to change all the item numbers when converting to a new system.
When integrating Dynamics BC with other systems, we've encountered issues due to the fact that most others are not limited to such a small Item number.
Several ISV's already go through the product making the 300-500 necessary changes to extend the length. We won't be able to extend the field as a modification in the cloud offering.
Thanks,
Comments
Still Under Review, come on Microsoft, with 157 votes you need to change the status to PLANNED. You have made changes to the system with other requests for considerably lower user votes. We have been waiting long enough, so please give this request top priority.
The decision by Microsoft to originally use 20 characters for this field was a huge mistake and indicates you did not do enough research on this topic with your customer base. It needs to be rectified immediately. 50 Characters for this field should be more than enough and will keep your current customers happy and loyal.
At the moment, this is a huge issue for us.
Category: Inventory
. Please implement this option. This is a huge issue for us, especially when ordering, as the full part number does not pull forward even using the description. Creates so much work to double check it may as well be manual
Category: Inventory
Really wish Microsoft would reconsider this particular issue. It is a major problem for many of the reasons already expressed by others above.
The issue would likely not be present if the Item References could be used in place of Item No. everywhere else in the system where Item No. is used, but this is not the case and likely would be more difficult than changing all Item No. character length throughout the system.
I would have expected this to be changed when the Serial/Lot No. was expanded, but unfortunately the job was left half done.
Fingers crossed that you reconsider this one soon.
Category: Inventory
Very much needed, this is our major roadblock to upgrade from Dynamics GP to Business Central.
Category: Inventory
I agree with all of you and with Peter Preuss specially. The electronic components business uses lots of letters and it's longer than 20 as the part numbers are reused. Mapping is cumbersome and slows down the sales and purchase order entry.
Category: Inventory
Very important in the manufacturing sector - here at COSS we deal with Aerospace clients, and they all require more then 20 characters.
Antonia
Category: Inventory
Some customers reuse the Part No. as their Internal Part No. (or Item No.). Extending Item No. will make BC future ready, as some of you here said already, things are changing and we need BC to do it too.
Category: Inventory
Very much needed for our products and parts. Not to mention future proofing.
Category: Inventory
Defending the 20 character limit on the item also seems strange when Microsoft just increased the Serial & Lot number fields in Business Central 14 to support 50 characters.
If Microsoft were concerned about database storage size or record handling increasing the serial number & lot number field to 50 characters would not have occurred.
The Item ledger entries and the warehouse entries arguably are always the largest in the entire database. That field increase also increased the storage allocation of two fields on the two largest tables in the entire database.
And SQL doesn’t allocate varchar storage based on the declaration but on the amount of data in the field.
Also, when serial/lot numbers are used and its in a lot of places making it 50 characters didn’t make them easier to handle or print, so why was it done?
To my knowledge the only justification was to support external numbering systems that support longer serial/lot numbering and because our clients’ needed to interact and convert to Dynamics BC when using those longer serial/lot numbers.
Category: Inventory
In an ideal world, 20 characters would be enough, everyone would follow best practices, and there would be an international standard that laid out the indelible limit so it would not be exceeded.
Also in an ideal world Dynamics would have the ability to reference an item with an internal id and use a different data presentation for the user focused item numbering. You can use the parts cross references and other information but again the users don’t interact regularly with those numbers.
None of these ideals hold true in the practical world.
I would agree there’s plenty of reasons to try and convince clients to stay in the 20 character limit. There’s lots of benefits and we can all understand them. If you can live with those then great.
Heck a (5-9) character item is even better. At those sizes people can remember the number, its fairly easy to key, prints well, and it doesn’t tax storage systems as much.
But, the reasons that we need 50 characters is the same reason we don’t reduce it to 10 characters.
1. The industry and competitors (most) already support much longer item numbers.
If your business is to communicate with these systems or convert from these systems its no longer straight forward.
Automated interfaces or individuals trying to use both systems now must have a visible mapping of 1 system to the other.
2. Manufacturers and vendors already use longer numbers and customers often reference their products internally by those numbers.
If a customer is looking at moving to Dynamics then reclassifying all of the inventory must be included in the implementation.
There’s nothing in rapid implementation that helps transition a client’s organization to relearn their inventory master. Not to mention reconciling the perpetual inventory with the accountants.
Category: Inventory
Business Central Team (administrator)