core_company table - vendor vs non vendor best practices?

[SandyL83]

Hello,

I am looking for some advice/best practices. I will preface this with company / vendor is a new topic to me. 

On the core_company table, we are using a requested item to populate a vendor (as part of our vendor risk management process). 

So on the RITM form, there's a reference field to select vendor. If Vendor doesn't exist, then a new record will be created on the core_company table, and the "Vendor" checkbox will be checked.  If vendor doesn't exist, a freeform field will appear for user to enter Vendor Name. 

The issue is the following scenario. The reference field on the RITM pulls from core_company table where vendor = true.

SO

If there is a Company named "Dell" on the core_company table, but Vendor is not checked, the user will enter "Dell". 

The issue is that since there is logic on the core_company table to not allow duplicate names (and I don't think we want to allow duplicate names)... this RITM is erroring out and not able to create the new company "Vendor" record because of duplicate names.

I am looking for feedback on how other companies do this. 

Are there any drawbacks to checking the "Vendor" checkbox on the "Dell" record if Dell already exists on the core_company table?

What if there truly is a "Dell" "Company" And "Vendor" (meaning maybe the address, contact info is different)?

i hope this makes sense to someone..

thanks!

[pascayer]

This is how the core_company business rules are intended to work. You will have the exact same issue with SAM and HAM for your publishers. A company can be activated to become a publisher or a manufacturer but to be available in the different drop downs throughout ServiceNow you need to activate the Company as a Vendor otherwise it will be missing from the list and there is a chance to create duplicates of the same company with different names.

We have a similar situation with the addresses and contacts and so far the only solution we found is to activate the Vendor Management module to have access to the contacts table which allow a much better management of the addresses and contacts internaly and externaly.