[Vtigercrm-developers] Question about the inventory mechanism

[Oded Arbel]

Hi all.

I'm evaluating vTiger CRM for my company, and there are several issues
where either I don't understand how to do things using vTiger CRM or
vTiger CRM is missing important functionality (important to my company ,
anyway ;-).

If its ok, I'd like to raise these issues here - not all at once, of
course - and get some feedback, and possibly solutions to these.

I'll start with the first question then:
We've developed an in-house inventory management application to manager
our sales of hardware products - we are resellers for a company that
manufactures extension cards for PCs. Each such card has a name, model
number and a serial number, where the serial number in unique for each
item - not product.

In our own inventory application, there is a "product" entity which has
a model number, and each product has several serial number assigned to
it. Due to commercial issues with out supplier (tracking eligability of
customers for support) , we need to track each item that is shipped,
using the serial number. Whenever we receive a delivery, we go over the
boxed and add the serial number of every item under the product entity
for that type of product. When we sell a product, we remove the item
serial number from the inventory.

We are not trying to use vTiger CRM to track inventory instead, but
apparently in vTiger CRM, the product entity carries the serial number,
so each product can have only one serial number available in the
inventory. This forces us to either register each boxed item we receive
as a product or ignore the serial numbers. We can't do the latter, and
the former is problematic due to several reasons:
- Creating a product entry is complicated and time consuming - creating
500 product entries for a shipment of 500 boards takes considerably more
time then recording 500 serial numbers somewhere.
- Product views (such as "Search for product" in the invoice editor)
rarely list the serial number, so you basically get a list containing
several dozens (sometimes hundreds, depending on the item) of similar
entries and one has to guess which carries the correct serial number.
- Inventory reports listing item quantity become completely useless.

Is there a way to do what we need that I wasn't aware of ?

Thanks.

--
Oded Arbel
Atelis
oded at atelis.net
Tel: +972-54-7340014
::..
Nobody takes a bribe.  Of course at Christmas if you happen to hold out
your hat and somebody happens to put a little something in it, well,
that's different.
    -- New York City Police Commissioner (Ret.) William P. O'Brien,
instructions to the force.

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