Multiple Manufacturers assigned to one part number/item?

[webzight]

I don't know right off how to do this and I did a thorough search of the forum (even though I thought I had seen this question before) and found nada

I have a client that supplies replacement parts for Original Equipment Manufacturer end items, that means multiple OEMs use the the same part number/item.

Is there a way to assign multiple manufactures to one part number/item

This is something I have been wrangling with since I first encountered VM two years ago

[John2400]

I presume you need this for accounting purposes

Just wondering if you had the items you sell in two caregories?

Category one is the part name ( your normal category)
Category two is the maufactures name

* make a product _ as the part number or name - put it in the normal category as you do but also add it to the Manufacture's category( whoever sells that product) too.

* Hide the manufactures category - it will never show up on the site.

* now every time you sell an item - it will be listed from the normal category and will also be against the manufacturer too

* To then sort out accounting issues - go into your data base and save the files as excel format - from here you can sort by ? maufacturer and product name , category.

maybe ?

[webzight]

Actually John it's for customers to able to search for a manufacturer/brand and find all the parts available for that brand, a real quick way to narrow down the search since not all manufactures/brands will use all the same parts and since it's only a 1400+ item database with 110 associated brand manufacturers, it should be a snap.

I have looked at and like the idea of making a manufacturer product category and am in the process of building the table to load same with CSVI

Thanks for the detailed reply

[Adam Bazaroff]

Any solution for 2.6.6? Don't understand, why Developers don't add multiple manufacturers? It strongly need for bookstores (2-3 authors on once book), music stores (CD compilations) and other.

[balai]

You can use custom fields instead of manufacturers to assign any attribute to your products. There is no any limitation to the number of custom fields that can be used.
There also filtering solutions that use custom fields, if you want to offer filtering experience to your users
http://breakdesigns.net/extensions/custom-filters