We've been using Zoho Inventory to buy parts, track them, and then use them in projects. For the most part everything is going fine, but the MPN field in Zoho Inventory is the one that we rely on to find parts and for some reason Zoho thinks that MPNs are only ever numbers and letters. 

Thus, if there's a part number like this:

STAUBLI 63.9318-22

TOSHIBA TLP291-4(TP,E)

SCSMPP-6-0.375-100

Zoho Inventory won't let me save that was the MPN, so we have to replace the periods, parenthesis, or commas with spaces. This leads to duplicate parts being created because when the real MPN is searched for, it doesn't come up. We've been trying to contact Zoho Support for a few months now without getting any real responses. I know that one suggestion is to create a custom field for MPN and use that instead of the built in MPN, but that seems unnecessarily complex and I'm frustrated by the need to create a custom field for something as integral to inventory as the Manufacturer Part Number. 

Does anyone have any other solutions?