Maximo Open Forum

If I am understanding your question correctly, you don't have Manufacturer Model or Catalog numbers and want to avoid having duplicates of the same part in ITEM MASTER / INVENTORY.

The only way I believe you could accomplish this would be to make your ITEM # the OEM Catalog information, which I would not recommend doing.  If the OEM changes their Catalog #, you would need to OBSOLETE the ITEM and create a new ITEM with the updated part number.

We have over 8,000 records in our INVENTORY and we use CATALOG # as the primary field for entering the OEM part information which we can quickly do a search from the GUI of Maximo without having to download to Excel / Access to create filters to look for duplicates.  

This also helps with INVENTORY REORDER so if you set that up for the site, you have all the information already configured so when you issue a PR / PO to the vendor, the OEM part number or vendor part number is on the PO for them to fulfill your order.

Regards,

Chad

We added the Maker Part Number and Model fields to the Item Master.  And when the item is pulled down to a site, it copies the PN and Model fields with it.  I can understand if your Item Master was full of consumable/generic items.  If you want a 2x4 piece of lumber, it doesn't matter if it comes from Home Depot or Lowes so you wouldn't want to limit the number with a store specific part number (which should be stored in the invvendor table anyway).  But our inventory & purchasing is 90% OEM specific.  If we need a replacement filter for a pump, we source the OEM filter.  But that's our procurement strategy.  Adding the fields to the Item Master is an option to consider.

You may also want to extend advanced search to look through the invvendor record:

There is a video that runs about 6 minutes to provide more detail. 

Thanks a lot @Chad Harrison ,
Yes you understood my query correctly. Actually, we have around 13000 items in inventory in which the part number was only defined the item creation and we don't use manufacturer for item identification even if items are OEM.
Your approach for managing inventory is valid and correct, i will review our inventory management strategy and will see if we can implement the same.
Thank you so much for your insightful input, much appreciated.

@gail smith thank you so much for your response.

I have also thought about creating a custom field in inventory for Part Number but since our inventory consists of many consumables & generic items apart from OEM so i was not sure if this will help us on data accuracy and avoiding item duplication.
In case the primary vendor catalog and model field didn't work i may think about creating this custom field in both the item master and inventory table while defining a relationship between both tables.
Appreciate your inputs much!

Thanks a lot, @Christopher Winston, I watched the video and got some useful ideas from it, however, this approach also needs some customization but if this facilitates tracking the OEM and managing inventory then I will try it definitely.

Appreciate your input and the video link you shared it here!