I was wondering if Purchases and Licenses be uploaded to FNMS via business adapters through csv or xlsx files? I was also thinking if the one off upload feature on the data inputs tab is a feasible option?
Please let me know your thoughts and best practices.
Business adapter is good option to import purchase orders and license creation where purchase order data need to be consistently updated automatically. One off PO upload and processing is nice option when PO data doesn’t require update. Hope this will help to decide an option that fit for your business use case. Cheers Aamer
We have a PO Business Adapter that runs on a regular basis. I haven't found a way to convert the PO lines into licenses, though. That seems to be a manual process. If there were a Business Adapter, that would be awesome. You can set your PO's to automatically connect to licenses that the system finds, but I don't do that.
Erick Hacking, CSAM, CHAMP IT Software Asset Manager, Lead Sr.
What if we feed the PO line item as a license name in a another column and use the business adapter so that it will create the licenses if there is no SKU/Part no available and then use it for mapping. I'm not sure whether this is a good practice/Suggested and not sure if i'm in sync with the topic here.
@winvarma - That is not a recommended approach. Create the purchase item using the Business Adapter. If there is no SKU/Part Number, then use the "Process Wizard" on the Unprocessed Purchases view, which will guide you through the process of creating a new Software License by selecting the Software Application, optional Purchase Program (if this application is in the Product Use Rights library), and then adjusted the Use Rights of the license. Remember, that it is possible that this is a purchase that may have been processed before, and in that case you would link it to an existing license instead of always creating a new license.
@kclausen - Thanks for sharing the Best Practice steps. i would request you to provide the steps to be followed from creating a PO to mapping it to a Software application mapping to license and PO, if there is an SOP/document for that.
I recommend that for more information on the processing of Purchases/Creation of Licenses, you go into the Learning Center. Under the FlexNet Manager Learning Path, look for "License Creation and Optimization with FlexNet Manager".
In relation to automation of linking purchase records to license records (and creating license records from purchase details), check out the Automatically process purchases option and its associated settings on the system menu > System Settings > Purchases page. Documentation describing this option can be found here.
In my experience most people prefer to not use this automation and instead manually process purchase records as @kclausen has described. This helps to appropriately consider and handle the various complexities that happen in the real world in purchase records that can't get adequately reflected in imported data to make automation really effective. However if you have a simple scenario and simple purchase data then automation may be useful for you. It may be worthwhile trying it out in your test environment to get a sense of how this automation works before letting it loose on production data.
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