vtiger

[john]

I am very impressed with vtiger and the new UI enhancements in v5. I am hoping to use vTiger as the core CRM and customer support software for our company. There are two main enhancements I hope the inventory management system can be enhanced to support. First a simple bill-of-materials support, and second "unit inventory control".

I know vTiger is primarily a CRM system, but I believe my suggestion would enhance the value to many potential users of your product/invoicing and support ticket system.

Any company that builds or assembles components into a final product, and must "track" that product for warranty and support purposes would benefit from these features. Although we make kiosks, any business that assembles "parts" ( eg. motherboards, hard drives, CPUs, power supplies etc. ) into "products" (eg. DesktopPC, MultiMediaPC, etc) would require the same features. Some "parts" are tracked by serial number and some aren't, and the assembled "products" are assigned a serial number for tracking through the warranty and service cycle. There are I'm sure many ways of approaching this in vTiger, but here is a suggested approach you may wish to consider.

1. Add a bill_of_material table.
At its simplest this has a row entry for each ["product" <xxxxx> contains quantity<q> of product <yyyyy>]

(you could have a separate "parts" table, but I think it's more effective and simpler to keep "parts" in the same table as "products". That way the "sale order" and "invoicing" interfaces only need to "pick" from one table. Sometimes you will sell "products" and sometimes you will sell the component "parts")

2. Add a serial_control column in the "product" table. If equals "true" then this "product" must have entries in the new "product_serial" table.

3. Add this "product_serial" table. Every product that is controlled by serial number needs a separate entry in this table. At a minimum this table would indicate productid, serialid, and info on the purchase and sale of this item (note that this implies that if a product had serial_control=true and qty_onhand=5, there would have to be 5 rows in the product_serial table with status="onhand"

I know the above is a simplification, but I'm hoping the development team sees the benefit of providing some initial support for this in v5. If there is interest, I'd be happy to provide more detailed suggestions, but I thought it would be good to see if the developers see this product philosophy as fitting with vTiger's evolution.

- John

[r2gnl]

I prefer this as well, allthough I would suggest providing this as addon instead of core development.

Regards, Remco

[joerg1004]

Adding the ability to track serial numbers for inventoried (and sold) product would be FANTASTIC.

[nemocir]

Nice feature to be included, but i think should be in the core sin ce it can help for service contracts.

[dagr]

Tracking of Serial or Batch number control of products sold is essential to some industry sectors (medical products, medicines, certain foodstuffs, etc.). By essential I mean legally enforced, not just a nice-to-have.

It would be nice if this could be assigned to a product at Invoice/Delivery Note stage and then somehow tied in with service contracts and Contacts. For example, list all tracable products sold to customer X, or list all customers that have product type Y (with serial/batch numbers listed too).

David.

[broom]

We want to startup a new company and would really use vtiger, but therefore we need this functionality. John approach would be nice to us; you can always add more specific userfields.
I will have a look at writing a solution myself, but for i'm pretty new to vtiger, I can't estimate the effort.

Broom

[woodelf]

Control of products by "serialised item" is a major requirement for any of us handling machines or electrical controls - without it you can not track faulty goods back to the supplier or accurately provide warranty for our customers.

Problem is of course that this touches on the accounting subject of fifo, lifo or actual costing...!

Anyway, a basic serialised item control would be very, very useful :)

Thanks,
Nick

[JB]

Has there been any updates on Johns first post?
Although we have used Vtiger for some time now as a CRM solution we have been unable to effectively use the Stock Control features. We produce a product from a list of other components, we have been unable to find a method to add components to one product so that a Sales Order will effect the component stock level. Is this possible anyone??

Serial Number / Warranty control for both incoming and outgoing stock would also be a huge asset to our product control. Is this likely to find its way into Vtiger?

Johns post is an ideal solution for any manufacturer using Vtiger, without it stock control with Vtiger is near impossible.....unless anyone can suggest how we can??


JB

[theheartcollector]

Hello.
I'm trying to implement serial number support in vTiger 5.03 based on John's model but I'm finding it very difficult to realise. I'm stuck at the front end modifications part in the "Creating a new module" section in the Developer Guide. All I can find there is how to make a module similar to the Campagns module which is not even close to what I need.

Is anybody else working on this? I could really use some more details / documentation...

[opto]

Hi,

there is some bill of material and I think also serial number stuff in webErp. (also PHP and some open source licence)

Would it be possible to combine that?
What I thought of for example are triggers and stored procedures in MySQL5 to synchronise two databases. This would make it possible to use less code changes (otherwise: how to upgrade?).
Opentaps also contains part of this, as well as Postbooks (don't remember which software/language they are based on).

Klaus