It's not secret anymore that that the main advantage of OpenERP is that it's simple, easy to use and fully integrated. So, it can take as short as a few seconds to create a sale - purchase workflow, starting from the quotation, confirming your sale order and if not enough stock it will automatically create the Purchase Order to your supplier.
Very good process, but you must make sure that the products are configured in your OpenERP database, manually maintain the prices of those products, confirm manually your Purchase Order to your supplier and so on.
Now, let's consider an example in a store reselling computer devices. When a customer comes to the shop and asks the price of a product, a quotation will be created to get latest price (which often changes everyday). This requires manual calculation on the margin. Extra info desired by the customer can be date of arrival of the product, so the company has to do its investigation.
Unfortunately, the customer doesn't always decide right away and will return on a different day to confirm his order. In many cases, the price and availability from the supplier are not valid any more. So, the store has to begin the process all over again. In the end, the customer will confirms the sales order.
As a result, a PO is generated by OpenERP but the company has to re-encode manually the PO in the supplier tool. Then, check a few days later why the product was not yet been delivered and what's the new delivery date. Finally, the store will make a small margin of 5% on the 35 EUR product while it spent almost an hour in different steps to make this order.
OpenERP-Ingram module makes your life easier! It simplifies a lot the above list of tasks in the sales purchase traditional flow !
How does it works ?
Once the module is installed, you can configure a new Ingram Micro profile containing your credentials. You can then download automatically the complete list of products from the Ingram Micro catalogue to your OpenERP product database. The best is to schedule a synchronisation (once a week, once a day, several times a day, etc).
As a consequence, when creating an SO you can directly see all the available products from Ingram, their current prices, availability, browse by category, etc... Of course you can apply the price list and have the correct margin applied automatically.
Before confirming a SO you can check if they were changes in prices and stock availability between the last update of the SO and now. This is useful to ensure the prices and availability are still correct. Further, the SO confirmation triggers a PO, which you can review and edit manually as usual in OpenERP.
After the PO is confirmed it will trigger automatically the order to Ingram Micro, on which you can follow-up at any time the status of the delivery and the planned delivery date in OpenERP in real-time (it'll check it automatically from the Ingram Micro servers).
The gain of time by using this module is impressive! As in no time, you can provide up to date information to your customers. The module is available on Launchpad, fully Open-Source (AGPL). Nevertheless, BHC team is providing assistance, training and customization for this ule.
Watch here a short video on how this feature works!
