[ warning: long email ahead ]
Hi ,
Firstly , I am glad and excited to see the Business Process Reference
handbook
being made and I felt like contributing my few cents.
I was going through the organisation of the BPR and see how far it matches
horizontally with the diversity of applications covered in under OfBiz.
The list of applications in OfBiz ( leaving out tools,examples etc ) is:
Accounting / Accounting (AP) / Accounting (AR) , Asset Maint , Catalog
Content, Facilty, HR , Manufacturing , Marketing,My Portal,Order,Party,
Project, SFA, Scrum,Work Effort,BIRT,Business Intelligence,eBay,Handheld
Web POS.
List of Chapters in Handbook and approximate mapping of applications to
chapters is as below:
'(o)' indicates the top chapters of BPR and (*) indicates application
under Ofbiz.
(o) Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
* SFA ??
* Marketing ?? { '??' are explained after this list near end }
(o) E-commerce
* Catalog
* eBay
* Content
(o) Financial Accounting and Reporting
* Accounting / Accounting (AP) / Accounting (AR)
(o) Human Resources Management
* HR
(o) Manufacturing
* Manufacturing
(o) Order Fulfillment Process
(below is picked from doc itself)
* Inventory
* Sales
* Accounting
* Marketing
(o) Party
* Party
(o) Product Information Management (PIM)
* Catalog
(o) Sales Order Management
* Order
(o) Supply Chain Planning
(o) Warehouse Management
* Facilty
Applications that could not be mapped to BPR Chapters ( by me :-) ) :
* Asset Maint
* Project
* Scrum
* Work Effort
* BIRT
* Business Intelligence
* Handheld
* Web POS
Pls note : The above are observations and should be interpreted in the
light of fact that
my experience with ofbiz is too little at this moment as i am new to it.
however as an adopter of ofbiz at very early stages of my company i feel
the following:
(1) I wish that the Handbook puts appropriate focus to 2 distinct
processes which are generally present in any company , they are
*pre-sales* and
*post-sales* . Rite now both aspects are covered under one chapter
which is
"Customer Relationship Management (CRM)" . I guess "Customer" is a
Party(Group)
that pays to a given company(or Party) , before that it is only a
Lead or Opportunity.
So covering Lead in under "CRM" is probably undermining it. The
"lead" is currently
covered in the page after "customer" . Where as i think it should be
other way round.
https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OFBIZ/Customer+Relationship+Management+%28CRM%29+Process+Overview
The underlying data model of ofbiz is overwhelmingly fine-grained and
comprehensive as
I see it adhering to the best practices and hence the Business
processes mapping to the
entities should cover them in a top-> bottom approach (i feel) leaving
place holders for
future enrichment.
Generally pre-sales (Sales) and post-sales (Backroom) teams in
organisation are separate
and they differ in the level of adherence to systems and processes
also.
To summarize: I feel the *set* of processes for pre-sales and sales
and post-sales deserve separate chapters
and they have separate target audiences.
(2) Due importance to brick-n-mortar businesses :
There shall be many companies with no shopping carts and online
checkouts.
Hence document should also cope with lack of them.
(3) Due importance Services Companies: (SaaS offering )
There is nothing to ship from such companies and no tangible ,
countable
inventories.
(4) Glossary of Terms : The BPR should eventually include a Glossary of
terms.
(5) Glossary of Acronyms: The BPR should include a list of acronyms
preferably separate from (4).
(6) Could someone map the :"un-mapped" Applications to existing chapters
(in case they fit )
these were my few thoughts/cents.
( thanks for reading this far! )
regds
mallah.
