A Tool to Help Search for A Customer or Vendor on NAV Systems

By Marek Tylko | November 25, 2014

Problem:

Entropy demands that our databases are littered with duplicate customers and vendors; the ensuing reporting headaches and extra work creating credit documents waste our time.

This situation is hardly surprising, records are created while a user is taking an order on the phone, or from a handwritten note. Our first line of defense is to instruct order entry staff to search more diligently. Then we implement a Standard Operating Procedure, script or some other magic spell in an attempt to eliminate the problem. There is no simple way to thoroughly search for a customer or vendor to see who already exists in our NAV systems.

Solution:

Stoneridge has created a tool to help choose the correct customer/vendor without interrupting order entry flow. The requirements to implement the solution are minimal. A small code change to the Entry Pages in question and two extra search pages loaded into the system. We expect clients to benefit especially for: Sales Order, Service Order and Purchase Order creation.

A new “Customer Search” field is added to the document page, e.g. “Sales Order”. Instead of relying on the stock NAV “Customer Sell-to” dropdown, a user enters a portion of a name, phone number, address etc. and selects from a shortlist of possible candidate customers and ship-to's that appear in a new search window. It is important not to enter too much information. Searches that result in five to ten candidates will help to identify existing duplicates and to confirm the correct choice where multiple similar records legitimately exist. The search term can be embedded anywhere in the fields and case is ignored. The following fields are searched on: Name, Address, Address 2, Phone, Fax, Zip, City and Contact in Customer and Ship-to records.

Sales Order Entry Walkthrough

I pull a new order and surprisingly don’t have my desired Customer’s number memorized!

Tab to the new “Customer Search” field and type in what you know reliably. In this case I type in “furn”.

NAV Sales Order

When I tab off the field I see the Custom Search Page appear with Customer and Ship-to candidates.

NAV Customer Search Tmp

In the example above, a Ship-to Address was also retrieved (Its Code is 720).

When the correct record has been selected, simply click “OK” and your sales order “Sell-to Customer” will be populated along with the “Ship-to Code” if one was selected.

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