by Chuck Hartle » Tue Dec 05, 2000 2:13 pm
Hi Neil,
You are asking a great question. Going through the PROD.HIST files it was easy to create reports for Lost Sales and Emergency purchases (because the TC = L or E). Yet, pull the counter person number was impossible. The field is CNTRMN and this works wonderful for any SALES, but since Lost Sales are generally posted outside of an invoice creation for some reason ReyRey cannot pull the counter person number. However, there is the field "PORT#~" that you can pull if your counter people are on fixed port numbers, this way you can track it.
And ReyRey is not alone. ADP sees fit to do the same thing. With ADP, if you have PDA (Parts Data Archiving) you can go into the PDA.TRANS file and list a Lost Sale report with the port number.
Where this can get distroyed is if you have 'floating' port numbers with telenet and the port for each person changes each day.
It would seem like a simple enough fix. It is easy to understand that you want lost sales posting to occur but you want to track it effectively. Since most of the lost sales occur outside of the invoice and this is where the counter person posts his/her sales number for reference. The Lost Sale is a transaction code and not a sales code. Therefore, the perfect fix for this would be to have the lost sales prompt first prompt for the lost sales quantity and then ask for the counter person number and a short password. This way you, as the parts manager, could run reports on lost sales per counter person and the password would help to avoid "phony" lost sales postings by counter people.
With as many dealerships as we deal with, we have found several stores that post lost sales to try and increase the inventory levels. Since it is hard to run a report to capture the culprit, it continues over and over again. Simplicity and accountability is needed for sure.
Sorry for the long winded answer, but I am sure all of us would like to be able to set policy on lost sales posting and make sure that it is happening properly.
Any other suggestions?
Chuck Hartle'