Need to create new Purchasing Classes

IC06.1 is the screen to to to to create INVENTORY classes and the minor classes within them.

IC07.1 is the screen to go to to create Purchasing classes and any minor classes within it.

What he said. I was just going to reply.

On any Lawson form where you select pre-defined values, if you right click on the field you should have the option to "Define." If you select Define the system will open the correct form for you.

From the IC11, Classes tab, if I right click on the Purchasing Class field, I get the Drill Around option and Select option, but no Define option. As it stands now, I don't have access to IC06 or IC07, so I'm requesting it.

Thank you for the direction. I'll use the right click option the next time I need to find what related forms I need to look at as related to a particular form field.

Bev

I am trying to find any documentation on best practice for Minor Classes, to GL categories and item issue accounts. Can you point me in the right direction? The organization I’m with just implemented Lawson 9.0.1 in June of 2013 with some assistance from a consulting firm but minor classes weren’t built. In my former capacity at another health system, our Lawson system had a 1:1 relationship between our GL accts and Issue accounts. From there, the Minor classes were linked to a GL and that was linked to an issue account that was assigned a tax code to tie an item together. That isn’t the case where I am now (many to one relationship) and I want to be able to present the pros and cons with some certainty and advise on next steps…..

We use them to tie to the GL very little. I actually wish we did more but most of our items go to one main medical supplies issue account so it doesn't really come into play for us.

What we do use them for is our interface to EPIC Optime. We've built different minor classes as defined by the operating room management for their implant types and use the minor classes to assign the type of implant and send it through the interface.

Michelle

The classes are designed to be used to suit your business/reporting needs so it's hard to say what best practice is. I've seen them used to identify items for interfacing to other systems as Michelle's hospital uses them. We've used them to limit access to specific items in RSS/RQC and also for identifying groups of items for spend reports.

We set up our purchasing classes to mirror the primary GL category issue account for the item. Gloves would primarily be charged to our general medical supplies account, 895000, so the major class is 8950 with a minor class of 00. Normal saline IV solution would be charged to pharmaceutical supplies, 895002- major class of 8950, and minor class of 02.

If you have many GL categories assigned the same issue account, what is the purpose? Did they set that up because Finance wanted everything to be charged to a single account but they want to value inventory by product category?

Jon is correct - the uses for purchasing classes are far and wide.

I would add that some organizations use these classes specifically to "ADD" granularity beyond the general ledger. In other words, if your GL accounts do not offer you the type of reporting you need to manage procurement (or more specifically, the sourcing/contracting arm of procurement), then the purchasing major and minor classes can increase the granularity of data collection and reporting.

Example: if your GL has an account called IMPLANTS, but you want to report based on type of implant, you can create PURCHASING CLASSES for heart implant, hip implant, breast implant, etc. There are several standard Lawson reports that allow reporting by Purchasing Class, plus MS Addins can be leveraged to develop custom queries.

If you go down this path, you are correct that you will have a many-to-one relationship between classes and accounts and will need some sort of cross walk table that helps your data managment staff to setup IC12 GL Categories and IC11 accounts.

One final thought is that some orgs actually use UNSPSC codes to drive the purchasing classes. I have seen this done several ways, but one of my favorites is to use the first 4 digits of the UNSPSC code as the MAJOR PURCHASING CLASS for medical products and then create custom minor classes that rollup the thousands of possibilities into 30-40 classes. I can send you an Excel file that has this example if you like.

So, the pro of one-to-one relationship is simple data management and the con is reporting (depends on how granular your accounts are)
The pro of many-to-one is richer reporting, the con is data management becomes more complicated.

Mike

We would have the many-to-one and we are going to Mike's example - the UNSPSC family and class. The only difficulty is determining changes to the various versions. But with the GL it tends to provide the Value Analysis folks what they are looking for.