One to Many Business Relations - why is this not possible?

(0) Share

Report

Posted on by Community Member Microsoft Employee

Greetings,

I have the following business model that I will try my best to explain:

7077.companies.PNG

We manufacture and sell our products to our retailers, who we do business with. Retailers in turn sell our products to their customers.

In our NAVision environment logically only Retailers "X" and "Y" have Customer cards, since these are the companies we invoice & deliver our products to.

The customers (orange) are companies that we keep track of in our database for marketing (since they drive demand), these are stored as Contact Cards of type Company.

What I am trying to do now is to set up a way to link and track the customers with their retailers (eg to have an idea how many companies retailer X is serving).

My idea is to use Business Relations to link them. The setup is as such:

I've done the same for Customer B, and this seems to work fine until we get to Customer C, who buys from two retailers. When I try to setup the link to Retailer Y, after having already done one for Retailer "X", I get the error:

"Business Relation code CUSTOMER is used when a Contact is linked with a Customer."

I am wondering why a single Contact Card (Type Company) cannot have more than one link to a Customer Card. I'd imagine a business scenario such as ours is common.

Or am I using this wrong?

I am using Dynamics NAV 2017

Many thanks for the time taken to advise me on this matter.

*This post is locked for comments

All responses (2)

Answers (0)

Community Member Microsoft Employee on at

Like (0)

Report

RE: One to Many Business Relations - why is this not possible?

Hi Stefano,

Thanks for helping me out. Yes, I probably should have mentioned that it is Table 5054 Contact Business Relation.

I see. Indeed, I wanted to put them all in a single relation group I call "Customers". The idea is to allow my company to see, out of our entire database contacts, how many have already converted to become customers/tried our products before, and also which retailer(s) they belong to.

Are you suggesting that I use a new relation group per Retailer? I toyed with that idea but figured it will be very messy for the list as the intention was to have a small number of groups defined as per a typical "B2B relationship ladder" model eg:

[Prospects] [Partners] [Customers] + [Vendor] [Bank]

As we have quite a number of retailers (close to 70), I avoided this solution.

But I also imagine that our business model is not very unique. I am sure that many companies follow such a distribution strategy, so I am hoping if some of you guys could share with me how you visualised your customer landscape?

PS: We have a NAV solution provider helping us. We tried a few solutions previously (such as declaring companies as persons), but that caused many issues in reporting, such as Segments).

Looking for an alternative angle to resolve this.
Stefano Demiliani 37,162 Most Valuable Professional on at

Like (0)

Report

RE: One to Many Business Relations - why is this not possible?

Are you using Contact Business Relation (table 5054)?

If so, the key here is Contact No.,Business Relation Code and so only one relation for that Business Relation Code is admitted. You need to create a new relation code.

Why not using a custom solution?