Etiqueta: orders

openbravo

Orders Awaiting Delivery report

Ring, ring, …
– «Hello?»
– «Hi Matt, it’s Tim.»
– «Hi Tim, how’s the family?»
– «Well, but what about the status of my order 89276523D?»
– «Uhmmm…, wait a second please.»
– «Sure.»
15 minutes later…
– «Tim? Are you still there?»
– «Yes! I am!»
– «OK, so I talked to the warehouse guy and he told me that there has been an inventory shortage. So I talked to the production guy and he told me that he did not receive the raw materials. Then I talked to the purchase guy and …»
– «Don’t tell me stories Matt… My components haven’t been shipped yet, right?»
– «No, Sir…»
– «Grrrr! Bye!»
– «Is this a definitive goodbye?»
Tu, tu, tu, …

Did you find it funny? Tim, the customer, did not… neither did Matt, the sales representative. Poor Matt, how easy would his life be if he could know, right away, the shipping status of any sales order. And how much easier if customers could directly check the status of their orders by themselves, without having to phone him. Fortunately, Openbravo ERP is here and the Orders Awaiting Delivery report module is what Matt needs.

Functionality

Orders Awaiting Delivery report aims to provide a meaningful piece of information to sales representatives and managers:

  • What is the status of this sales order?
  • Have all the order lines’ products been shipped yet or not?
  • If not, do we have enough stock to proceed with the shipment?

And this information can afterwards lead to more questions:

  • If there was enough stock, why have the order lines’ products not been shipped yet? Is there any problem with our shipping company?
  • If there was no stock, why are we in inventory shortage? Problems in our production chain or problems with our suppliers?

Grouped by business partners and orders, the Orders Awaiting Delivery report will display in HTML or PDF format:

  • The order line product,
  • the ordered quantity,
  • the pending quantity to be shipped (as the ordered quantity minus the already shipped quantity)
  • and the quantity available in stock.

Report

This data can be filtered by:

  • Order date
  • Business partner
  • Delivery terms
  • Order document number (the complete or partial sales order document number in our Openbravo ERP system).
  • Order reference (the complete or partial purchase order document number in the customer’s information system).
  • Organization

Filter Window

Technical design

Packaged in a module, this report is made of a manual filter window and a Jasper Report template.

The 3 steps of this simple development were:

  1. The definition of the module,
  2. the development of the filter window
  3. and the design of the report template.

You can find the technical documentation in the project’s Forge and the code versioned and publicly available in the Openbravo source code repositories.

Extension

This report may not fill all Matt’s needs, so let’s extend it.

From a functional side, Matt wants:

  • That customers can directly access Orders Awaiting Delivery report in his Openbravo ERP system, so they do not have to call him for the information.
  • The customers have only access to their orders, avoiding that they see others’ data.

In order to achieve these functional requirements:

  • A new report will extend the original Orders Awaiting Delivery report. We will call it, for instance, Orders Awaiting Delivery for Customers.
  • A new role will be created, having only access to the new Orders Awaiting Delivery for Customers report.
  • A new user will be created. This user is associated to a business partner.
  • The filter window for the Orders Awaiting Delivery for Customers report will only display order date, order document number and order reference filter fields.
  • Business partner filter field will not be displayed but will be defaulted. The default value will be the associated business partner of the logged user.

Summary

Based on some business needs, we went through the functional and technical documentation of a simple report module, pointing to the relevant sections to develop it and presenting its extension possibilities.

Feel free to download and install the Orders Awaiting Delivery report module. You are welcome to provide feedback in the project’s forum and log issues and feature requests in the issue tracker.

Ring, ring, …
– «Hello?»
– «Hi Matt, it’s Tim.»
– «Oh, Tim, it’s been a long time… Did you receive the components?»
– «Yes, I did. No problem. How’s the family?»
– «Uhmmm… Well, thanks.»
– «I’m just phoning you to tell you that your Orders Awaiting Delivery for Customers report just rocks.»
– «I’m glad to hear that.»
– «Bye! Take care!»
– «You too, bye!»