If your firm routinely imports projects from other firms (for instance, if you are a purchasing firm that will be handling a project designed elsewhere), you will very often wind up with more than one variation for a given vendor.  After importing an outside project, you can switch all of "their" vendor's specifications to "your" vendor and then delete the now unused first vendor.

In this example, two variations of the same vendor, "CDS,INC" and "CDS" have been accidentally created and used in projects. The user is reassigning all specifications for "CDS,INC" to one of the other two ("CDS INC").

With one exception, the command is very straightforward: Highlight "their" vendor on the vendor list, select the command and then select "your" vendor from the list of vendors. At first, a "short list" is presented of probable substitutes based on similarities in either the Vendor ID or the vendor name. If you don't see yours, click on the "Show All" button to view the entire vendor list.

The exception is that if either vendor is typically used as a shipping destination (for instance, it is a chair manufacturer that routinely receives fabric), you will want to pay close attention to the shipping addresses displayed. Usually, you can allow your "master" vendor's shipping address to remain unchanged. However, in some cases, "their" address may be more complete than yours and you will want to use the "Copy" option to copy that shipping address to your vendor. In other instances, your vendor may represent a different facility and seeing a disagreement in the addresses may be a clue that "their" vendor should be retained after all.

If you plan to delete the incoming vendor after reassigning all of its specifications, you can check the "Delete" option before proceeding. Otherwise, you can delete the vendor later or let it remain as is. In no case will the system allow a vendor be deleted unless it is unused.

This utility is available on both the Vendor List and the Specification List screens. It works the same on both with two exceptions on the latter: 1) You cannot delete a vendor from within a project and 2) the utility only affects specifications within the open, active project.

If you wish to assign a group of specs to a new supplier instead of a new vendor, use the Assign Supplier utility instead of this one.