New Item Master

You can only have one item group per company. Switching it is a nightmare of PO maintenance because it's a hidden field on the POLine. NOTHING will receive in for the wrong Item Group. I'm also not certain how turning off an entire item group would help with the maintenance of preference cards, labels and locations.

No one likes the inactivating items process, but switching item groups is only going to create the nightmare exponentially worse.

I went through a similar situation recently and ended up recommending creating new items using new numbering. Kat is correct that creating a new Item Group is not the solution as there are data implications that go far beyond the Item data, such as, IC Company, PO Company. So not a good idea. Also in order to inactivate any items, their SOH require they be set to Zero if you're going to inactivate them in ITEMLOC and ITEMMAST. These are IC adjustments that require a write-off. The process of Item Master maintenance requires diligence and that it be part of the operations, not just a one-time occurrence, going forward to ensure accurate inventory data. You also have to be sure that none of the items exist in any open transactions, too. Once you identify the 70,000 items to inactivate, easy to use (V10 MS Add-ins or V11 ISD) to change their status. Yes, new numbering of items will require additional maintenance, but if they didn't maintain their data, this may force them to do better job of doing so to start anew.

I agree, that would cause a lot of downstream issues switching item groups like that. Also, if you’re going to go through the process of identifying “good active items”, correcting uoms, mfg info, you might as well just clean up the original item master. You should be able to export preference card data and bump that up against the items you identify as obsolete and work with your clinical informatics team to clean those up.

Thank you all for your quick responses. I  am in agreement it would be a nightmare to maintain and no real advantage over just cleaning up the existing Item master. Your responses validate my thought process. Now, I can communicate to my client  why they do not want to go down this path.