I am often asked if we can distinguish documents created in OE by employee or department, and have also had the same request for POs. Reporting and document management and tracking per department/ group would be significantly easier, as the document prefix is in the key index field and is a primary sort on finders / reports.

How about this for a flexible design:

- an employee group concept managed in Admin services. Create groups in a new screen. Assign one or many employees to each group either in a new screen or directly on the current employee screen.
- In PO and OE a new document prefix screen in the setup area, with a tab for each document type. In each tab is a grid, each group can be assigned a unique prefix.
- This prefix will be used in preference to the default prefix (which is still set as it is now). For each document type, if an employee is not in a group, or is in a group that has no specific prefix, the default prefix is still used.

This approach could also be used for AP and AR invoices / credit notes, but the highest pay-off would be in OE / PO.

An alternative (or even complementary) concept would be unique document numbers per employee group - so each group would have its own 'Next document number' field.

by: William W. | over a year ago | Operations Management