Hi Anil and Hans ! Thanks a lot for your contribution and let's continue this thread, maybe we will finish with detailed specs for new functionalities ! :-)
So, I will first explain what we want to do. Our goal is to build a rental business, rental of "movable objects" like you said. These can be DVDs, books, computers, anything you can rent and which need shipping. Furthermore, we want to provide a delivery-pickup with the renting. It means we deliver the rented product to the customer, and when the rental period is finished, we go to pick up the product. I think that the functionalities are pretty simple to understand, let me know if there is something unclear. Now, here are some comments about what I've seen in OFBiz. As you said and as I discovered, the rental module of OFBiz has been designed for non-movable objects, or at least products you don't have to ship. There is also a shipment module, which, from my point of view, has been designed to handle standard one way shipment. So, here is what we miss : - The rental system seems to work for any kind of products but I have not sure it's necessary to create work items in all cases. I still don't understand well this notion of work item, I suppose it is to track the use of human resources. I think there should be a distinction between rental products which requires work items and rental products which do not. - About the duration of a rent, it seems to me that the duration precision level is the day, it should be possible to have a precision level of the hour, maybe less. - About the price of the rented product, for now the price is a base price pe time, then it is multiplied by the duration. It should be interesting to have a way to specify more complex prices. No concrete sample to provide here, I still have to think about it. - Have the shipment module work with rental items and service items. This one is a big change I think. For rental products, one change could be to associate an InventoryItem to the product and then use the exisitng functionalities. Not sure if it can work because in this case the item is not sold but rented, and maybe this specific state requires more changes in the current services. For service items, the goal is to handle the fact that when you sell a service, this service may require shipments (or at least movements, not sure if the word shipment is appropriate here). Thanks for your time ! Cimballi
