Track consumables as assets but keep as consumable

[Aaron Brown2]

Greetings,

Our client has requested a capability that I cannot seem to wrap my head around.  We are developing a system that links Requests, purchase orders, transfer orders and assets to a parent project.  The relationship for projects to all the linked records is one to many.  Until now the client has been fine with assets being tracked to the project and not consumables but they have since requested that the system link consumables to the project.  I cannot seem to figure out how to go about this.

For instance.  Project A has a PO that ordered 25 of widget A and 5 of asset A.  As it stands, the 5 assets are linked to the PO which is linked to the project, however the 25 widgets are not able to be linked to the PO/Project because of how the system tracks consumables.  I advised that we could track consumables as assets but they want to keep them tracked as consumables.  

I do see expense lines as a possible way to link the consumable however if Project B orders 5 more of widget A, the system creates a new record then merges the two consumable records into the primary and doesn't keep the expense line information.  Customer wants to be able to see that project A ordered 25 of widget A and project B ordered 5 more of widget a.

Can someone help me figure this out?

[bammar]

Anything can be related to anything else in ServiceNow as long as there is a reference from table A to table B

Or even Table A. Widget to a child of Table B

I think they are jiust trying to reference these records from a Project- so you just have to figure out how to connect them relationally. You still have to be careful these things dont affect any rollup calculations. 

Also yes you can make 0 dollar expense lines manually and hang them of a Cost plan or something like that- You can make a widget/consumable cost plan with 0 planned cost- and have them manually make 0 dollar consumable expense lines with explanatory details....

[akash_mehta · Accepted solution]

Aaron:  You say that the PO is associated to the Project (assuming a reference field to the Project table).  So, basically the PO Line is also referenced via dot-walking capability.  You could create a relationship record and utilize the same concept that links PO records to Request records (via the PO Line/Request Line relationship).  Basically, you would want to see all the consumable purchases (so you can filter out based on model class)...they won't see the actual "alm_consumable" record, but they will see the quantity of consumable x and cost...maybe this will work for what they are trying to do.

https://docs.servicenow.com/bundle/sandiego-platform-user-interface/page/administer/form-administration/task/t_CreateDefinedRelatedLists.html

Sys ID of OOB Relationship record to mimic:  c195b2c237b13000158bbfc8bcbe5dd2

Hope this helps.

-Akash

[Aaron Brown2]

Akash,

Project is a table we created in a scoped application.  We added a field to the PO table in order to create the relationship with our custom project table.  

We would use the request line as the relationship however due to the nature of the customers operations, they don't use the Service Catalog and thus do not submit requests.  The "request" is a list of equipment, tracked in Excel, that is uploaded to the project  (we are working on a workflow for this or even an import feature to create requests but the customer has asked us to pause on that.)  As such, as of right now, there is no way that I can see to relate the consumable asset to the purchase order/project.

I was thinking of putting a reference field on the consumable table to reference "projects" and place it as a list then update the consumable with the project using a business rule or client side script, however I want to try to do this without scripting/coding if at all possible.

Thank you!  I am going to look into your suggestion though. 

[Aaron Brown2]

This helped me alot.  I was able to figure this out by creating the relationship on the Project table and to query the PO Line Items table.  It may not show the "asset records" of the consumables but it shows how many of each consumable were purchased and what PO/PO Line Item it correlates to.