Making an order request form but need the ability for multiple items entered into the same order

Kaleb Riley

I work at a manufacturing company, and I am creating a request form for our parts department. The way it is intended to work, is our Maintenance Technicians fill out a form with basic information (their name, part number, priority level etc.). This form notifies the parts department to check into the order and then sends an update request to retrieve a price and ETA from the vendor.

The series of automations continues from there through the whole process. To the purchasing department to cut a PO, to management to approve or deny the request etc... All the way up until the order is either nixed or received and ready for pickup... In either case, it notifies the Technician who submitted the order of the result.

I also have several reports and a couple dashboards to make the jobs of each party a bit easier, since the primary sheet using the form is more than 10 columns wide.

The problem that we realized today, is that often times the Technicians will come in with several parts on a list to get ordered in the case of say, scheduled maintenance, or a part failing that causes several other parts to need replaced....

Currently the only solution that I have is to have the technicians submit individual requests, and then the parts employees will then indent the subsequent parts into a child/parent structure... Which then I could set up functions to automatically calculate out the total prices, auto-fill PO numbers etc... However I see many potential problems with this as the Parts department is not only totally unfamiliar with Smartsheet, but are all unlicensed users due to their lack of using it at all before this point.

I know that I could IN THEORY add in several more columns to just leave space for more parts, but then each of those columns needs to have its own price column, and then several different reports to include the different possible number of items on an order... And sometimes these guys come in with a list of 10 - 20(or more) parts on 1 order! The list goes on and on.

I am wondering what the recommendation for this would be? How could I make it possible for a technician to submit several parts into 1 order, and simplify the job of those in our parts department.

For reference, once this is live, they will likely be getting anywhere between 1-3 dozen requests on a daily basis, and a they receive requests for multiple parts more often than they receive requests for a single item number.

Andrée Starå

Hi @Kaleb Riley

I hope you're well and safe!

I'd recommend adding the additional columns so everything is on one row. I think that's the simplest solution.

I hope that helps!

Be safe, and have a fantastic week!

Best,

Andrée Starå | Workflow Consultant / CEO @ WORK BOLD

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