Hi, thanks for your suggestion, in fact we have considere this. However, there does not seem to be an easy way to find items with a (partial) match thorugh the search field, but rather through filtering attributes for certain values. Also, we would have to add each mafucturer number (of which there will be many thousands) to the attribute options.
As a simple made-up example, I would like to add a pneumatic cylinder to one of our products. The cylinder is manufactured by FESTO, designate AEN-S-10-5-I, and listed as 4891759 in the FESTO catalogue.
The part is given an item number through our CAD PDM (lets say No. 1001). So there are two unambiguous identifiers for this part: The BC Item No. 1001 and the external Item no. 4891759.
Different vendors list this item under their individual Vendor No. (OT-FESTO079051 at Landefeld, 203-9923 at RS Components, 302-64-000 at Distrelec and so on). Those I understand are vendor references. However, there does not seem to be an option to specify one unique "external article no." through references?
If I would like to add this item to a BOM or simply check if this item exists before accidentally adding a duplicate, I would like to simply find it through the simple item search field (just like searching for the description, our article no. 1001 or search tags). Adding this as an attribute does not seem to provide this functionality. Searching for "1759" for example does not yield this item, despite being a partial match with the aforementioned external item no. 4891759.
