Submit your Suggestions for Spectrum

It is frustrating for our organization that the character limits for Job Name is capped at 25 characters. project names exceed 60+ characters, and forcing us to abbreviate everything down to 25 characters to where it's still intelligently decipherable is oftentimes just not possible.

This has led to problems with the wrong jobs being charged for items, causing their JTD costs to far exceed their estimates and leaving the other job looking like it's brilliantly profitable. Not to mention the time it takes to locate the specific job name in the list that you are looking for - since you're having to try to un-abbreviate everything in your head as you go.

I'm just guessing that there are a lot of fields that have been set with low character limits to make them more compatible for reports such as the Contract Status report, where there is a lot of information to fit on one page.

The solution I would propose here is to introduce a new 75-100 character limit field for the full project name and then re-purpose the old project name field as a "Report Friendly Project Name" field that we could then more appropriately abbreviate using a new naming standard.

The same issue applies to Inventory Item Descriptions. I believe they are capped at 30-35 characters, but we have some that would require 75+ characters to accurately distinguish without literally abbreviating every single word and eliminating spaces.

This has caused us the problem of an ever-growing item database of duplicated items because someone could not locate an already existing version due to the abbreviation we were forced to use being nearly unintelligible. I have located some instances where an item was re-created 5+ times over the course of a year and a half due to multiple users being unable to recognize that it was already there.

(A BONUS request here would be the option to merge item codes for instances where this has happened)

If we could have an additional field added just like with the suggestion above where we can put the long name for the item and have a "report friendly" version, this will enable us to avoid the rampant problem of item codes being inadvertently duplicated because someone was unable to read the crazy abbreviation that already exists.

The solution I've provided here is intended to keep you from having to go through and fix tons of reports and inquiries, but still enable us to have better data integrity with both our job costs and item databases.