Linked Parts Issues?

Yahoo Archive
1
Brian,

Thanks A LOT for taking the time out to provide me with such a
thorough reply!! I REALLY appreciate that brother! My Parts fields
are updating now as they should. I failed to set the fields I wanted
updated in all companies in Global Table Maintenance. Thanks again!!

--- In vantage@yahoogroups.com, "Brian W. Spolarich " <bspolarich@...>
wrote:
>
> Sal, that sort of how it is supposed to work. Here's the deal with
> Global Parts (and Customers, Suppliers, etc.) I've been working with
> Customers and Suppliers, and we're in a multi-company situation as well,
> although our parts aren't shared between companies, but the others are
> (we have a centralized AP and AR group).
>
>
>
> First, remember that "every company stands alone" in Vantage. Every
> table has as its part of its composite primary key the Company column,
> and the business objects always use the currently-selected company as
> their first filtering criteria for every update. So all of the data you
> interact with has to be defined in the current company. This means
> there is no central "master file" by design. You could carve off a
> company and put it on a separate server or database (although to my
> knowledge Epicor doesn't offer a utility to do this yet). I suspect
> this architecture is intended to support scalability as well as company
> acquisition or sale situations.
>
>
>
> Linking records between companies works like this:
>
>
>
> 1. You mark a record in the "parent" company as Global and save
> the change.
>
> 2. MultiCompany process runs once per minute, looks at the config
> defined in System Management/External System Integration/External
> Company Maintenance, sees the new global record, and determines what
> companies this global record could be "sent to" for potential linking.
> You could choose to send Parts, but not Customers for example.
>
> 3. Staging through the IM* tables MultiCompany with the help of
> Sonic creates a GlobalCustomer/Part/Vendor record in each target
> company. If anything goes wrong Integrated the MultiCompany.log file
> will tell you what happened, and you'll see its progress in high-level
> detail.
>
> 4. Now you have a GlobalPart record (or whatever) that you can
> link to from the "child" company. However you do still have to do the
> linking.
>
>
>
> In terms of updates, Global Table maintenance (same place as External
> Company Maint) lets you define from any given source company what fields
> should be updated between linked entities. What we discovered in our
> implementation is that you need to define the same set of fields on
> "both sides" of the relationship. Basically we went into each company,
> and for each of the other companies just sent all of the fields for the
> stuff we're sharing. This is non-intuitive, but nothing happened until
> we did this (at least in .405).
>
>
>
> There is an action in Ext. Comp. Maint. called "Initialize
> MultiCompany Global Part/Supplier/Customer" but it is intended for use
> in situations where you've created a new company and now want to
> initialize the Global* table with the linkable records for the stuff
> that already exists in the parent company.
>
>
>
> In terms of linking, yes you have to do the linking of the records you
> want to use yourself. Vantage doesn't provide a "link everything" tool.
> For our first implementation I tried to develop a ServiceConnect
> workflow that would do this after tracing the activity in the client,
> but I didn't understand what I was seeing well enough to do it, and so
> we resorted to using a GUI scripting tool to automate the process via
> mouseclicks on the client. Not elegant, but it worked for us initially.
>
>
>
> I'm working on developing the SC workflows for linking customers and
> suppliers now so we don't have to do the GUI automation thing again. I
> can share my results when I have them.
>
>
>
> Once you have linked the record, it is not updateable in the child
> company, and the only way to update it is to either 1) update it in the
> parent company or 2) set the "Global Lock" flag which disables updates
> from the parent company. This makes sense - you have to decide which
> side of the relationship is authoritative. We decided just to send
> everything from the parent company, but it may be the case that if you
> send only a subset of fields from the parent you can maintain some data
> centrally and some at the child company level. That just occurred to me
> now.
>
>
>
> Hope this helps.
>
>
>
> -brian
>
>
>
> --
>
> Brian W. Spolarich ~ Manager, Information Services ~ Advanced Photonix /
> Picometrix
>
> bspolarich@... ~ 734-864-5618 ~
> www.advancedphotonix.com
>
>
>
> From: vantage@yahoogroups.com [mailto:vantage@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf
> Of idiabos
> Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2008 9:51 AM
> To: vantage@yahoogroups.com
> Subject: [Vantage] Linked Parts Issues?
>
>
>
> Hello I am new to Vantage and just completed setting up the
> Multi-Company Process and SonicMQ to link our Parts Master across 4
> companies. The functionality of this is not that great from what I
> see so I was wondering if I don't have things set up properly. After
> I mark a Part has Global in Company 1 and the Multi-Company Process
> runs I don't see the Part in the Parts Masters of the other Companies
> until I go into to "Link Part" tab and manually Link the newly
> available Global Part. Can this be easily automated? Another thing I
> notice is that if I change a Global Part in one Company I have to go
> into the other Companies and "Unlink" that particular part then ReLink
> it so that the changes come through. Am I missing something or is
> this how this functionality is supposed to work? Thanks!!
> -Sal
>
>
>
> .
>
>
> <http://geo.yahoo.com/serv?s=97359714/grpId=20369/grpspId=1705007181/msg
> Id=72181/stime=1229611879/nc1=3848583/nc2=3848641/nc3=5170420>
>
>
>
>
> [Non-text portions of this message have been removed]
>
2
Hello I am new to Vantage and just completed setting up the
Multi-Company Process and SonicMQ to link our Parts Master across 4
companies. The functionality of this is not that great from what I
see so I was wondering if I don't have things set up properly. After
I mark a Part has Global in Company 1 and the Multi-Company Process
runs I don't see the Part in the Parts Masters of the other Companies
until I go into to "Link Part" tab and manually Link the newly
available Global Part. Can this be easily automated? Another thing I
notice is that if I change a Global Part in one Company I have to go
into the other Companies and "Unlink" that particular part then ReLink
it so that the changes come through. Am I missing something or is
this how this functionality is supposed to work? Thanks!!
-Sal
3
Sal, that sort of how it is supposed to work. Here's the deal with
Global Parts (and Customers, Suppliers, etc.) I've been working with
Customers and Suppliers, and we're in a multi-company situation as well,
although our parts aren't shared between companies, but the others are
(we have a centralized AP and AR group).



First, remember that "every company stands alone" in Vantage. Every
table has as its part of its composite primary key the Company column,
and the business objects always use the currently-selected company as
their first filtering criteria for every update. So all of the data you
interact with has to be defined in the current company. This means
there is no central "master file" by design. You could carve off a
company and put it on a separate server or database (although to my
knowledge Epicor doesn't offer a utility to do this yet). I suspect
this architecture is intended to support scalability as well as company
acquisition or sale situations.



Linking records between companies works like this:



1. You mark a record in the "parent" company as Global and save
the change.

2. MultiCompany process runs once per minute, looks at the config
defined in System Management/External System Integration/External
Company Maintenance, sees the new global record, and determines what
companies this global record could be "sent to" for potential linking.
You could choose to send Parts, but not Customers for example.

3. Staging through the IM* tables MultiCompany with the help of
Sonic creates a GlobalCustomer/Part/Vendor record in each target
company. If anything goes wrong Integrated the MultiCompany.log file
will tell you what happened, and you'll see its progress in high-level
detail.

4. Now you have a GlobalPart record (or whatever) that you can
link to from the "child" company. However you do still have to do the
linking.



In terms of updates, Global Table maintenance (same place as External
Company Maint) lets you define from any given source company what fields
should be updated between linked entities. What we discovered in our
implementation is that you need to define the same set of fields on
"both sides" of the relationship. Basically we went into each company,
and for each of the other companies just sent all of the fields for the
stuff we're sharing. This is non-intuitive, but nothing happened until
we did this (at least in .405).



There is an action in Ext. Comp. Maint. called "Initialize
MultiCompany Global Part/Supplier/Customer" but it is intended for use
in situations where you've created a new company and now want to
initialize the Global* table with the linkable records for the stuff
that already exists in the parent company.



In terms of linking, yes you have to do the linking of the records you
want to use yourself. Vantage doesn't provide a "link everything" tool.
For our first implementation I tried to develop a ServiceConnect
workflow that would do this after tracing the activity in the client,
but I didn't understand what I was seeing well enough to do it, and so
we resorted to using a GUI scripting tool to automate the process via
mouseclicks on the client. Not elegant, but it worked for us initially.



I'm working on developing the SC workflows for linking customers and
suppliers now so we don't have to do the GUI automation thing again. I
can share my results when I have them.



Once you have linked the record, it is not updateable in the child
company, and the only way to update it is to either 1) update it in the
parent company or 2) set the "Global Lock" flag which disables updates
from the parent company. This makes sense - you have to decide which
side of the relationship is authoritative. We decided just to send
everything from the parent company, but it may be the case that if you
send only a subset of fields from the parent you can maintain some data
centrally and some at the child company level. That just occurred to me
now.



Hope this helps.



-brian



--

Brian W. Spolarich ~ Manager, Information Services ~ Advanced Photonix /
Picometrix

bspolarich@... ~ 734-864-5618 ~
www.advancedphotonix.com



From: vantage@yahoogroups.com [mailto:vantage@yahoogroups.com] On Behalf
Of idiabos
Sent: Thursday, December 18, 2008 9:51 AM
To: vantage@yahoogroups.com
Subject: [Vantage] Linked Parts Issues?



Hello I am new to Vantage and just completed setting up the
Multi-Company Process and SonicMQ to link our Parts Master across 4
companies. The functionality of this is not that great from what I
see so I was wondering if I don't have things set up properly. After
I mark a Part has Global in Company 1 and the Multi-Company Process
runs I don't see the Part in the Parts Masters of the other Companies
until I go into to "Link Part" tab and manually Link the newly
available Global Part. Can this be easily automated? Another thing I
notice is that if I change a Global Part in one Company I have to go
into the other Companies and "Unlink" that particular part then ReLink
it so that the changes come through. Am I missing something or is
this how this functionality is supposed to work? Thanks!!
-Sal



.


<http://geo.yahoo.com/serv?s=97359714/grpId=20369/grpspId=1705007181/msg
Id=72181/stime=1229611879/nc1=3848583/nc2=3848641/nc3=5170420>




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]