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mckinnmdmckinnmd 

Managing Serial Numbers via Contracts

Hi everyone,

I am currently working on a project involving Contracts and Serial Numbers. I would like this particular group to utilize Salesforce to manage the serial numbers and contract info (start/end dates, Support-Level, etc.) versus paying to use another service.

Basically there's one unique contract "number" (actually letters & numbers). You then have "machine types" and "serial numbers."

The object may need to be custom as our current contracts object is unique-numerical, without any user input. I'm not sure, though.

Each Contract has one or many machine types.
Each Machine type has one or many contracts.
Each Machine type can have one or many serial number.
Each Serial Number has a Machine type.

Are there current fields available that would work here? The only thing I could see that is even close, is the Long Text field, but it doesn't meet the needs of the group. Pick lists are too limited (there could be thousands of serial numbers and hundreds of machine types).

Can this be done without visualforce, and without creating more than one custom object? If it can only be done with visualforce, does anyone have anything written and would be kind enough to give me a helping hand?

Thanks very much for your help.
CRMGeneralistCRMGeneralist
Have you looked at Assets at all to manage your Serial Numbers/Machine Types? Our service group uses Cases/Contracts/Assets to manage their overall service needs this allows them to generate the service order/manage their product/serial numbers/apply these products-services to their contracts.
 
 
mckinnmdmckinnmd
There a few problems with assets (or so I thought) that turned me away from their use.

1. Unfortunately the integration between these service contracts and the actual customers in SFDC probably won't match a 1/3 of the time. In other words, the customers being used by the contract team won't be shared, even though they are the same customer (I realize how bad this is, but I've recently taken over as admin and cleaning up the database is a top priority).

2. The assets object has a serial number field, but would that support hundreds of serial numbers per "asset"? We're a VAR so it's quite possible to have an ever-changing list of machine types and the serial numbers would be contract-specific and would come from a CSV file passed along to us from our distributor.

Thank you for your help!