What is Parts Sales?

Parts catalog

A new type of catalog is introduced in Parts Sales to segregate part commodities from other products that the merchant sells. This catalog is like a subset of the original product catalog except that it only lists the equipment that have available Parts. From the Parts List view of the individual equipment and machines, the user can drill down into their product structures and expose the various parts available on each level of the structure. The information available in the parts list view include the following:

• Item Number

• Customer Item Number

• Item Name

• Category

• Manufacturer

• Supplier (if configured in M3 BE)

• Price

Parts Details page

The Part Details page shows detailed information about a single part. It appears when a customer clicks the item number anywhere in the Customer Center, such as from the item list, personal shopping cart, or order form.

Catalog content search

There are different search methods by which users can locate parts from the catalog. These search functionalities are built based on the Lucene technology to enhance performance and portability. Available in the Parts List view is a search mechanism that filters based on some fields or columns in the list. This search mechanism allows the user to search for parts produced by a particular manufacturer or maybe search according to item classification.

Another search mechanism is the Quick Search function which, when Infor e-Commerce is "Parts Sales-enabled", asks the user to identify what catalog type (Product Catalog, Parts Catalog, or My Equipment Catalog) will be scanned. The search keyword(s) will be searched from multiple fields in the list such as Item Number, Item Name, Description (and Customer Item Number if applicable).

Equipment drawings

Users can also search for parts in a graphical navigation tool with the use of equipment drawings. These are diagrams that describe the parts that are installed in a particular level of an equipment’s product structure. The drawings are linked together to create a visual alternative of traversing into an equipment’s product structure apart from using the parts list perspective.

In the Business Center, these drawings can be uploaded and mapped with hotspots that will represent the installed parts of a particular sub-assembly. All drawings can be managed from this section of the Business Center. However, if Infor e-Commerce is configured to integrate with Infor Document Management, the IDM client from Infor Smart Office can also be used manage the drawings.

Infor Document Management and equipment drawings

Infor Document Management (IDM) is a system with a central repository of unstructured data (documents, images, and others) that can be linked to M3 business objects such as customer orders, invoice records and item images, among others. By linking these unstructured objects to their corresponding records in the M3 BE, IDM creates a more information-rich ERP application and provides ease of retrieving related documents. For example, item images stored in IDM can be linked to an item record in the M3 program MMS001 for graphic identification of that specific item. Printed order documents (PDF format) from M3 BE can also be saved in IDM and linked in the same manner.

Infor e-Commerce connects to the IDM server for management of equipment drawings and making them available to customers. This is an extension of the Equipment Drawings feature of Parts Sales where users can map hotspots to drawings and relate them to purchasable items in the Infor e-Commerce product catalogs. If enabled in Infor e-Commerce, Administrator users can upload and modify equipment drawing details either through the Business Center or the IDM client interface in M3 BE. The primary difference is the repository of images, which will now be the IDM server instead of Infor e-Commerce server.

Access control

Generally, connection to IDM can be controlled by the application property Application > IDM Enabled. Switching the value of this property decides where the drawings uploaded through the Business Center will be stored. If this property is enabled, drawings are uploaded to the IDM server; otherwise, images are stored in the Infor e-Commerce server.

At present, since this is tightly coupled to the Equipment Drawings feature, it needs to be complemented by the application property which controls access to Equipment Drawings (that is, Application > SPS Enabled).

On a per-user access level, the following feature elements are necessary:

IDM Server connection parameters

In order to properly connect to the IDM repository, some connection parameters and credentials need to be setup in the Business Center > Application Setup > Application details section. Please see your IDM Document Repository Server manual for more information.

Lucene Index

There is a separate set of Lucene scheduled jobs, indexes and Infor e-Commerce custom stages for Parts and regular products. In Business Center, enable the scheduled job LuceneSPS.Index to create the index for Parts searching. The original set of Lucene jobs for regular products (Lucene.Index) are still intact and is used to facilitate indexing and searching of those items. Similar to the Lucene Job for nor-mal products, if changes were made to the data, LuceneSPS.Index would have to run to reflect the changes.