openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Olivier Dony <odo@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 12/13/2012 01:57 PM, Alan Lord wrote:
> On 12/12/12 17:34, Olivier Dony wrote:
> > = Invoices =
> >
> > I've just tested and the sequence and descriptions seem to propagate
> > well between SO and Customer Invoice. On a side note the "handle" to
> > reorder invoice lines is still missing, that will be fixed soon.
>
> OK Great, but what about the flow: SO -> DO -> INV. IMHO it needs to be
> retained all the way through the system.

The information will be propagated through the "name" field of the various 
lines: SO line -> DO line -> INV line. However this should only be the case for 
the real "product" lines indeed. More about this below.


> > = Delivery Orders =
>
> On a sale.order, add a multiline "comment", e.g. a line item with zero
> qty and no product/cost. It is *this* kind of comment that my customer
> wants to see in the Delivery Order... (A note in the _layout module)

This is not really supported, or at least, not more than it was with the 
standard *_layout modules. You can create dummy lines but since they're not 
real product lines they won't go through the procurement/delivery flow, and 
won't appear on delivery orders.

This is consistent with what I meant before w.r.t warehouse management: when 
you enter the procurement/delivery workflow, you're only concerned about real 
products. And a lot of things may happen to the flat monolithic list of lines 
you entered in the SO before it reaches the customer: each line may be 
split/back-ordered/scrapped separately and in any order. There's not much sense 
trying to keep several lines grouped together under a "dummy subtitle" in this 
context.

As far as I know the _layout modules did not do this differently.


> When their customer confirms the Quote and they confirm the sale.order,
> the main document they use from that point forward is the delivery order
> (stock.picking). They can't amend the sale.order now as it has been
> confirmed, but the actual quantities and specifications often change
> between order acceptance and delivery (this is often several months).
>
> When they start to deliver portions of the order, the Delivery Note
> should show to the installers and receivers of the goods exactly where
> items are to go, e.g. First Floor, Underwear section. Ground Floor,
> Fruit & Vegetables etc. (Remember, they have already entered all this
> information once already on the Quote.)
>
> This is why maintenance of the line ordering is very important. It can
> take quite a long time to create a complex sale.order. When the line
> ordering and notes etc. get lost after confirmation, it just means they
> have to repeat that work again (usually in a spreadsheet, to provide
> this important information to the their client.

I'm afraid this is too specific and belongs to a customization module, because 
it requires strong assumptions that are incompatible with the generic case 
OpenERP wants to support out-of-the-box (It looks like you need to have SO 
lines = DO lines = Invoice lines in all cases, and/or must be sure that 
operators follow a strict human process that is not enforced by the system)

It would be trivial to implement in a custom module: the information is already 
there.


> If there is a better way to do what they need then I'd like to know
> about it, but OpenERP as it now (they are on 6.0) is not optimal due
> these arbitrary decisions on when and how line ordering and line notes
> get used.

The whole procurement and delivery process of OpenERP is driven by notions of 
procuring goods and getting them delivered to locations on certain assigned 
dates. The units of work in this process are procurement orders: bring a 
certain quantity of product P to location B on date D. If there is a piece of 
information that needs to accompany the unit of work through the whole 
workflow, it should specified on it.
Everything else is logically built upon this foundation (and not exactly 
arbitrary).

Naive suggestion: put the important information in the long description of the 
SO lines themselves, not just in extra dummy lines. You could put "tags" at the 
end of product lines, e.g. [FLR1,UW] or [GF,F&V] and so on, possibly with a 
caption at the bottom of the SO, if the tags are not obvious enough.


> Printing is not really an issue. *All* our customers use Aeroo and
> heavily customised reports anyway. I know of none that use the default
> templates. As long as the data is in the system as we can access it with
> a decent reporting tool then that's fine.

Well then, you can design the reports the way you want anyway :-) And given 
that a DO has a relationship to its source SO, the information has always been 
there in the database anyway, even before we allowed multi-line descriptions.

I wonder how you handle the fact that any given SO may end up being delivered 
in 20 different partial shipments (with as many back-orders, delivery notes and 
invoices), though.


> The same applies when the DO is used to create an Invoice. Although it
> is not so important, our customer would like the Invoice to reflect the
> same ordering and notes etc, so their customer can see what exactly they
> are paying for ;-)

Similarly, if the important information is in the product line description, it 
will accompany it everywhere.