Re: Handling Orders

[Chris Travers <..hidden..>]

On Wed, Mar 4, 2009 at 5:15 PM, Jeff Kowalczyk <..hidden..> wrote:

>
> I was initially surprised to see that the oe/orderitems tables are used
> for both Sales Orders and Purchase Orders. Note also that the parts_id is
> used for the Purchase Order, not the partsvendor.entry_id

Not all vendors have partsvendor entries for all parts they sell.  The
partsvendor is just used for price matrix tracking, and it will be
extended in the future to handle vendor-specific sku's.

>
> Several customization opportunities seem like they would work to track
> stock-to-order workflow:

Sure.

>
> Track by project
> ----------------
>
> The first option is to customize to fill in a project_id on the generated
> purchase orders. This won't require modfication to the orderitems table
> schema.
>
> If you elect to use convention of a 1:1 customernumber:projectnumber
> (automated with triggers and enforced with contstraints, etc), a project
> can seem very much like a customer from your user's perspective.
>
> I am doing this now, and it makes the use of timecards for the workflow of
> logged services to sales orders much quicker. The users don't really
> notice a difference between a customer and a project, as the number is the
> same.
>
> There will probably need to be some customizations to display and make use
> of this project entry. But there at least seems a natural place to store
> the link between the Sales and Purchase orders for stock-to-order.

That also sounds helpful.

>
> Add orderitem_id column to orderitems
> -------------------------------------
>
> This would require a bit more planning and execution, but what we're
> really trying to track is a Sales Order line item out for order on a
> Purchase Order line item. Even (especially) if you had a huge trading
> partner with dozens of orders open, you are tracking item availability at
> the line item level. So perhaps the most sensible thing is to link the two
> by id.
>
> It's only an implementation detail of LedgerSMB as of branches/1.2
> that these are in the same table. Otherwise, I suspect we'd have had a
> (optional) link between Purchase Order and Sales Order line items already.
>
> Any thoughts?

That sounds helpful.

Best Wishes,
Chris Travers