Re: Can sales orders affect inventory?

["Chris Travers" <..hidden..>]

LedgerSMB is moving in the ERP direction (it already has basic Supply
Chain Management capabilities, but so do most SMB-oriented accounting
applications on the market).  I am interested in understanding what
people require from an MRP perspective (and whether this complicates
everyone else's life enough to make it an optional module).

There are some very basic MRP capabilities in LedgerSMB at the moment
(take a look at the Parts Requirements Report for example).  As we get
further into development, I expect there to be some discussion on
these matters.

On 11/13/06, David Ratte <..hidden..> wrote:
> What you are asking about is called MRP (material resource planning) and is
> traditionally beyond the scope of an "accounting package". A package that
> does both accounting and materials planning (plus a few other things) is
> generally called ERP or enterprise resource planning which would then have an
> MRP module.
>
> The whole function of MRP is to plan forward based on 'real orders' with
> differing specific shipdates and 'proposed' orders with different shipdates.

What is the difference between a proposed order and a quotation?

> It helps to organize your manufacturing operation bringing in all the
> necessary materials at the latest possible date to meet your shipments. A
> good one allows you to 'what-if' so if someone calls to place and order 3
> months out, you can quickly see how filling this order would affect your
> other customers.

Also note that this is the general purpose of the Parts Requirements Report.
> One of the most detailed (open-source) ERP applications I've seen is Compiere
> which has a STEEP learning curve and requires JAVA (yuk).

My experience of Compiere is that it is a Microsoft Access-like
front-end for Oracle with some wizards for helping automate some
aspects of an ERP setup.  Very useful for some things, I suppose.
Probably not for the SMB market.  (There is also a Brazilian project
to port Compiere to PostgreSQL.  I have not tried it.)

Anyway, I think you are right that for the moment, the best thing to
do is to integrate with another product.  However, long-run, I think
we want to look at least at tuning existing capabilities to be more
useful and see how much can be added in a way that is generally
applicable.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers