On Apr 28, 2008, at 8:54 AM, BJ Freeman wrote:
short answers:
OOTB does not direct support services, but has bee modified in the
past
to do this.
I wouldn't agree with this... you can manage the whole process of
taking requests, planning/performing services, billing for them, etc.
OOTB you can not yet do project(activity) planning though a lot has
been
done in this area.
Yes, quite a bit has been done in this area and it is currently
possible to do a lot of these sorts of things, including complex task
hierarchies, multiple hierarchies for a project and other ways to
manage it and report on it differently, even a gantt chart based on
the hierarchies and such.
OOTB you can do quotes and turn them into sales.
some of the things you looking for can be added.
Don't see a problem in accomplishing what you want.
Suggest you go through the demo and see what is there and not there.
sebastianscheid sent the following on 4/28/2008 7:15 AM:
Hi,
I am still trying to understand the functional concepts of OFBiz to
find out
if it is the right product for me. I find that quite difficult,
because
documentation is not complete and there are so many functions of
which I
think, not all are necessary for me. So I want to ask if someone
could show
me the direction where to search.
I am trying to map the following business process to OFBiz:
My company sells services. There are no physical goods to be
produced or to
be managed in a warehouse. There is no need for a webshop, the app
would
only be used by the backoffice.
For the most services we provide, we in turn have to order other
services
from external service providers. These providers may produce a
physical
product that is shipped to the customer (I have already found the
drop
shipment in OFBiz).
The major task I want to do with OFBiz is to
- create orders for customers
- plan which services we have to buy from external providers to
fulfill a
sales order
- plan when certain activities have to be done by us, the customer
or an
external provider
- track the status of these activities
So, a sales order seems appropriate to start with. Purchase orders
could be
used for other service providers and work efforts seem to be useful
for
activities. My problem is, I don't get it all work together.
My idea was to use this pretty cool drop shipment feature to link
purchase
orders (for the external providers) to sales orders. But it seems
to be not
implemented yet (see earlier posts) and I don't know how to link a
new
purchase order to an existing sales order. Furthermore a drop
shipment has
to be declared before the sales order is actually created. But I
want to
create the sales order (perhaps from a proposal) and later assign any
purchase orders to it.
The next problem is to plan the activities. I can create Work
Efforts which
I can see in the task list (type task) or in the calendar (type
event). But
I don't know how to assign a task to an order, so I could track the
fulfillment of the order.
Another question: can I define alternative products in a proposal?
I.e.
assign an alternative product to a proposal item whose price is not
calculated in the sum of the proposal. So the customer knows he can
choose
from these two items (and can calculate the price itself, or
perhaps it
would be cool if only the difference for the alternative product is
shown in
the proposal).
Two last questions:
1. Can I attach external files (like received invoice pdfs) to an
order or
any other object?
2. I have recognized that the party entities have a historization
feature
(the name in the profile has a history). Is this a generic feature
which can
be enabled for e.g. sales orders, too?
Thanks a lot for reading so far and for giving me any advice
With best regards
Sebastian
