Hi David:
Nice to hear from you again. Thanks for your input. I have some
responses. Please see below:
On 12/9/11 4:44 PM, David E Jones wrote:
Ruth Hoffman wrote:
2) If you look at how vendor/supplier is used in some of the OFBiz
applications, you might observe that:
A vendor "supplies" goods or services to the Company of record for the
OFBiz instance. Those goods or services may be raw materials for
manufacturing, products for resale on the ecommerce site or computers to
run your business. When a vendor (with a record in the VENDOR table)
supplies you with something, they are acting in a role called a "SUPPLIER".
So, in the OFBiz world, my interpretation is: A vendor is a supplier. It
is as simple as that. Anything more is making it too complicated :-)
Anyone care to comment on my interpretation?
Actually a Supplier is a Party the sells things to the company running
OFBiz, hence the SupplierProduct entity. In other words, a purchase
order is sent to a Supplier.
A vendor is also a Party that could sell things to the company running
OFBiz. Just depends on how you set up your accounting system and how you
name your accounts.
The term vendor doesn't mean much in OFBiz, but has been used for any
Party that sells something. For example, if you have multiple stores in
your OFBiz instance you may have a vendor per store. You could also have
multiple vendors selling through a single store.
Seems to me if the Party sells something and the term vendor is used to
express that activity, then the term DOES have lots of meaning. OFBiz
e-commerce, after all, is all about selling products.
That said, there is also an entity named VendorProduct that when coupled
with the Vendor entity may be used in the same way as the
SupplierProduct entity. Perhaps I should have said a vendor is a type of
supplier? Unfortunately (or maybe fortuneately - who is to say?), the
data model does not enforce this relationship.
They are not really equivalent terms.
Maybe, maybe not, but I would argue, based on the data model, that they
ARE equivalent terms when a vendor acts in the role of supplier.
Regardless, there is really no need to make this more confusing or
complex than it already is.
Regards,
Ruth
-David
