How is everyone managing prospective supplier contacts within Epicor or elsewhere? Our Epicor supplier list is limited to suppliers that are currently active, ones we have all the necessary financial forms for, contacts, etc… As we continue to grow, we find other suppliers that may be beneficial for certain projects, materials, services, etc. but don’t want to set them all up and clog up information when we may end up never using them.
We currently have a couple of Excel docs to manage this and I’m working to improve their functionality with keywords and search boxes. But they don’t include anyone we may already have established in the system so they could be overlooked by estimating or procurement depending on if they rely more on Epicor vs. Excel.
Anyone have any creative solutions - SharePoint site, 3rd party apps, etc.? Ideally something that would also be able to integrate with Epicor to pull the suppliers that are setup as part of searches.
If we step back to the larger philosophical issue, the tension is between having :“one Source of Truth” (meaning ALL data is in a single location) and “don’t want unnecessary data cluttering up my database” (meaning whatever someone defines as “unnecessary” needs to be stored somewhere else).
In EITHER case, SOMEBODY has to maintain the data (in either one or multiple databases) and EVERYBODY needs to know when, how and where to look for what they want to find.
I make no bones about the fact that I’m a “single Source of Truth” aficionado, and then part of the maintenance process is keeping that Source updated with why we didn’t use this supplier this time… maybe “unapproving” them and possibly other UD fields so everything is available for all who need to know. That same data would ideally be required in the “second” data source anyway. Why split it up?