openerp-community team mailing list archive

[Wouter Tebbens <wouter@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Dear community,

for a while now I'm involved in a local cooperative for sourcing large
part of our domestic needs directly from ecological producers and small
scale distributors. We're 30 families and have 1000+ products or so.

We're currently running an old customised Drupal ecommerce site to
manage part of the process. It is time to change that and I'm
considering OpenERP.

Does anyone know of peaple having set up something similar, are there
existing modules developed in OpenERP to facilitate the process?

Particularities of our self-managed collaborative consumption / group
buying include:

* customers/consumers are families part of the cooperative, they are the
owners and users of the system
* purchase orders need to have a date in the agenda to signal to the
users when the cut-off date is to enter consumer orders, that are then
grouped into one PO
* each consumer has a shelf in our little warehouse and when the
purchase order arrives, it is distributed to the shelves of the
families. So - apart from returns - all goods are incoming, and are
picked from their shelves by the users/families/consumers. It is
necessary to generate a list of the received goods split out to the
shelves where they need to be distributed to. This happens generally the
same day (by the team responsible for that provider), and fully
independent from any other provider delivering at a later date. This is
quite different from standard distribution processes.
* customers/consumers should be able to add products to their "shopping
cart" and see the cut-off dates of the PO for that provider
* we also use a "standing order": for some products - e.g. eggs, bread,
strawberries, diary products - the users can choose to make them
permanent, so they they're ordered every week or other period chosen
* we'll want to expand the product definition to include several fields
for ecological certificates, coordinates of the producer, links to
recipes. (But that won't be hard to do.)
* at some providers we only confirm the order when a sufficient volume
is reached, but that is easy to manage with the default purchase order
process.

On the accounting part I was thinking to assign a dedicated account for
each family/customer in order to track their transactions.

If you have suggestions on how to set up such a process in OpenERP and
possibly with the help of specific addons, that would be great.

I imagine that quite a few initiatives of group buying and collaborative
consumption have similar requirements. And indeed there are a few
specific tools already developed (and shared under free/open licenses),
but they're not as solid and versatile as OpenERP.

thanks in advance,

Wouter