We are a startup and through our design process we constantly have to change Inventory Items to Lot Numbered or Serialized Items. Since Netsuite does not allows us to convert Items into Lot or Serialized Items, I have to manually do: • Rename exiting Inventory Item by adding "-DNU" at the end. • Create the New Lot or Serial Inventory Item. • Transfer Existing Inventory On hand form the old Item to the new Item. • Updated active BOM's using the old item to now select the new lot/serial Item. • Some times, update open PO's with the old Item to the new one. It is a lot of work when we have a list of Items to update. • Have any of you come across a better way to do this? • Is the any Netsuite or 3rd Part tool that I don't know about that will help us with this? I will appreciate any information my might provide. Thank you.

Curious why you would first create them as Inventory Items? Why not Lots from the beginning?

I agree with you, but we are startup up and things change all the time. Some times we have to reclassify items and based on that and government regulations we need to start tracking lot/serial numbers.

I have never seen a better way to do this, or any tool/script having been made to automate the process. Being able to convert between standard, lot and serialized is a loooooong standing enhancement request, but, somewhat understandably, has never been implemented

At a previous company, I wrote a Suitelet that would automate the steps for merging item records, including transferring inventory, updating open orders etc. I don't have code I could share but if this is something happening constantly it might be worth the investment to develop an automation

honestly, if there was a suiteapp for this, it would sell like hot cakes

Thanks a lot for all this information. Yes, I think we will need to write something to automate this. Definitely Netsuite should build something and make it part of the standard implementation. Thank you again.