Jonathon,
Please understand this is a tall order, and WAY outside of what I can
offer right now... It's late Thursday, or early Friday, and I haven't
even hit the half-way mark on my billable hours for the week... ;)
You're in way big luck though! There is a fair amount of
documentation on the docs.ofbiz.org site about this. Just please keep
in mind that as you mentioned there is a LOT to this, lots of
options, lots of related services and sub-systems (components), and
depending on what you're trying to do what all of this means to _you_
can vary a lot.
Anyway, check out the various pages Jacopo has prepared about
manufacturing, and there is some helpful information in the Undersun
docs in the end user docs area (the OFBENDUSER space) on the
docs.ofbiz.org site.
If you want to review the data model, I can tell you some of the main
entities real quick, and doing a search of service and UI artifacts
with the entity names you can find a lot in a hurry because of the
way things in OFBiz are generally designed and written. If you're not
sure about how those fit together, review the Framework Introduction
videos a couple of times would be super helpful. Anyway, here are a
few important ones, look at these and the ones related to them:
InventoryItem
OrderItemShpGrpInvRes
ItemIssuance
These relate to other things like OrderItem, OrderItemShipGroup,
ShipmentItem, etc. You can browse around these relationships using
the Entity Reference pages in the WebTools webapp.
So, see, wasn't that easy...? ;) Hopefully this will at least get you
started and then you can come back to the mailing list with more
specific questions.
-David
On Jan 4, 2007, at 12:47 AM, Jonathon -- Improov wrote:
Hi David,
How does OFBiz address inventory and on hand, safety stock,
committed, issued, on order, etc.?
What happens when there are backorders? I see 2 items for the same
inventory: 1 to record backorders, the other for actual physical
quantities. Is this true?
What about stock issued from the production run? How does that
communicate with the inventory system?
There's a lot of nice automation here, like auto-generation of
production run at Job Shop when customer orders an item that isn't
in stock. I do admit this area is probably too complex to get right
in one sitting (how long has this been in development?).
If you can provide some documentation on the whole inventory system
from the developer's perspective, I could help to RAPIDLY iron out
the bugs here. I'm a good tech docs writer too, so I'll be able to
churn out docs for you that are well laid out. (With regards tech
docs, the best docs are written into the software in the form of
user-friendly error messages or tool tips.)
I am VERY inclined to work on the inventory system. I am currently
trying to see if OFBiz is suitable for a versatile manufacturing
industry that is very nimble (has good mix of product types built-
to-order and prebuilt). Please help me, so I can help OFBiz in
return. Thanks!
After I'm done with ironing out all aspects of the manufacturing
and inventory system, I'll probably move on to start the human
resource module.
Bring me to the same page as you are! Let's do something for each
other.
Alternatively, I could reverse-engineer the entire OFBiz with
`grep' and charts and such. But I'd much rather work with the
community. Either way, I need to get going soon. My boss is
breathing on my neck. He's not had a very good impression of OFBiz
ever since he and I spoke with Si Chen. The multitude of bugs
(which he himself spotted easily) and blatantly unprocessed error
messages don't help either. I'm still struggling to tell him things
are ok with OFBiz.
Help...
Jonathon
