Multiple MFRs & P/Ns under one item?

ERPNext Manufacturing
1

I’m just coming up to speed with ERPNext, and there is a lot to digest. I’m starting with parts inventory and specification. We design circuit boards that are built by a Contract Manufacturer. We purchase some strategic parts to consign to them, but the CM purchases most of the components (like resistors) based on our specifications.

The manufacturer & part number for the components we use is our Approved Vendor List. A commodity like a resistor could easily have six or more manufacturers on the AVL. So the BOM that we provide to the CM includes the QTY of each component required to build a board, and also this component AVL so they know what to buy.

In going through the Item fields in ERPNext, I see a spot for multiple vendors, but only one place for a manufacturer & part number. A vendor in this case would be a distributor who might carry several of the manufacturers on our AVL. And there are multiple distributors we might choose from based on price and available inventory. So I see the utility of having multiple vendors. I just need a similar capability for the MFR and part number.

Is there is a straightforward way to add multiple manufacturers to an Item, perhaps in much the same way that we can have multiple vendors?

2

You may need to add custom fields etc to customize the doctype for this. Here is the link you may find helpful

3

Thanks much for the pointer. What seems to work for me is to use the “Item Supplier” table definition as a template for a new “Item AVL” DocType, then I added a new section in the Item Master for this AVL. I found I had to select each item in this new table and click “In List View” for the table headers and data to display correctly on the Item Master form.

Thanks again - this will let me import my current data to find out what the next challenge will be.

4

For anyone running across this, an extremely similar commit to version 8 was made shortly after this post. Rather than a custom field (which I am still using after importing my data into it), you can simply use the now standard Manufacturer table under Item. See here and here

It took me awhile to notice it, then I wondered what this redundant field was after we upgraded to Version 8. It has the same fields and structure as what I implemented in a custom form a couple of weeks before the commit. I guess in biology this would be a case of convergent evolution.