On Apr 16, 2009, at 11:14 AM, Ean Schuessler wrote:
We're in the process of overhauling the Brainfood.com site and I'm
trying to leverage the SFA system. I see some simple things that
don't work, like it not storing address and telephone information,
but those are easy fixes. I'm more interested in what the workflow
is for dealing with leads on an ongoing basis.
To me it would be logical if a Lead could be graduated to an
Opportunity and an Opportunity could, in turn, be graduated to a
Project. Leads seem mostly to be a special case of a party and the
use of the partyStatusId as a lead state tracking mechanism seems
like an abuse to me. It seems to me that the process of qualifying a
lead should probably have its own distinct data element. Depending
on your point of view, it could be a WorkEffort or at least a
CommunicationEvent that has child CommunicationEvents associated
with it.
Thoughts?
A couple of, perhaps wild and crazy, thoughts:
1. to get the process down and work together to refine it and make the
implementation match it would be _great_; this is the sort of effort
that I think will be the next great phase of existence for OFBiz (and
what I plan to push in coming months and talk about at ApacheCon in
Nov and to some extent at OSCON in July); the documents for this are
in a new space on the docs.ofbiz.org confluence site here:
http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBREQDES/Universal+Business+Process+Library+Index
(in the OFBREQDES space)
the page for the early part of the sales process is here:
http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBREQDES/Sales+Representative+Seeks+Prospects+and+Opportunities
As you can see there isn't much in that story (I haven't gotten to it
yet... :) ), just some ideas about things that should go into the story.
2. I think the most literal modeling of this would involve extending
the PartyRole entity to add a statusId (and perhaps add a
PartyRoleStatus entity to keep the status history); I got to that
though by starting with: what is a lead? It is basically a role that a
party can be in, and for that specific role we want to track the
party's status; this concept could be used for other roles as well,
but seems to make good sense for a lead, account, etc in the sales world
-David
