Serial numbers in MO and other issues with Order/Manufacturing flow

Using my Dolibarr
1

I’m trying to establish a good process for my small dental lab for tracking orders. Currently:

Existing Process:
EP1. We receive an order form
EP2. We create a manufacturing order based on this form
EP3. After we make the product, we build an invoice and send our product.

However, as we are looking to develop our new process there’s a few steps missing, namely

  1. Sometimes, we have to ship out a half-done product for a test fit, and then return it and finish. How can we track this and associate it with the manufacturing order? Or should each one be a project or a sales order?

  2. We associate a serial number with each of our products, but in the Manufacturing Order it doesn’t automatically assign a serial number using the automatic generation of serial number I’ve assigned in the Lot/Serial module. I have to manually assign one each time. I actually don’t know where a serial number gets automatically generated as I’ve not ever gotten this function to work.

  3. I want to have the invoice specify which serial number product we are shipping, and automatically reduce this from our stock. However, in the Stocks module “Decrease real stocks on validation of customer invoice/credit note” is greyed out if we are using Serial Numbers. So how do we do this? I see that there’s the ability to reduce stock on a shipping is set to closed.

  4. (Actually related to #3) If I want to have a shipping form, I see that we can generate a Sales Order, and from this we can generate an Invoice and a Shipment, but there’s no way that I see to generate a Manufacturing Order associated with this Sales Order. Should we instead be making a project for each one?

2

  1. There is a module “Advances Stock Transfer” which allows to create delivery notes for transfers between 2 warehouses.
    The warehouses and the production orders can be connected via projects or CA

  3. we reduce stock on shipment and have modified the pdf-template sponge/crabe for displaying the S/N (if available) on the generated PDF

  4. this should be generally solvable with complementary attributes.
    Sales order refers to a CA defined in the modul MO. Maybe from a drop-down-field with valid Sales orders.
    The workflow is imho normally Sales order first and later the MO is created from the BOM and connected to the Sales order.

All the workflows are special and I’m sure there are some trapdoors that you don’t see at first glance but whose possible existence should be kept in mind anyway.

1 Like
3

Thanks for the reply - I will have to look more into the Complementary Attributes. I like the idea of the advanced stock transfer but I think it’s maybe confusing for me … I think I do have something that can work.

What I think I will end up doing for now is to

  1. Generate some not-for-sale intermediate products for the ones that we potentially have to send out. This is pretty easy actually with Excel/Import in Dolibarr
  2. When we receive an order, we will generate a Sales Order for the final product
  3. We generate a linked manufacturing order for the Sales Order that makes the half-done product
  4. After consuming and producing this intermediate product, if we must send it out then we make a shipment for the intermediate product. Once it’s returned we can receive him back in some way.
  5. We make a new manufacturing order (also linked to the sales order) for the next step that consumes this intermediate product as one of its inputs
  6. After any intermediate steps, the final MO outputs the final serialized product and we ship it out, and when we generate our invoices this (serialized) final product. For now I think we are copying the serial number into the item description, but it will work.

Thanks again and if anyone else has input please let me know. I will post my final workflow once it’s done.

Also, I’ve been using Robot Framework to automate a lot of these intermediate steps in Dolibarr, so repetitive steps (like copying serial number from the shipment to the item description on invoice) aren’t too bad although they’re not elegant.

4

At first glance, that’s what comes to my mind:

1.) and 2.) agreed.
3.) ok
4.) I think your approach will not work, because the sales order is for the final product and a shipment is based on this sales order.
5.) and 6.) ok

1 Like
5

So it’s not super beautiful, but if you allow your intermediate pieces to “sell” for 0 then you can generate a shipment, and once work comes back you only must “Re-Open” that previous shipment for the work and cancel it, it returns the stock back into your original warehouse.

It’s fewer steps than moving the stock into a different warehouse representing dropping it off at the client using the advanced stock transfer functionality, and it is much easier to associate with the overarching project and keep tabs on which order specifically this stock belongs to, but it’s not … nice … at all.

Probably I will go into the advanced stock transfer way.