My company is looking at using ERPNext for tracking our manufactured goods. We have a slightly unique angle though because the products we build are long lived and sold on a leasing model. So they get sent to customers, return, get serviced, go back out. We’d like to track the hardware through that lifecycle and keep a record of where it has been over time. If I navigate to a customer, I’d like to be able to see what hardware is at their location. We have a custom workflow around the hardware as well and ERPNext seems to be able to handle that quite nicely.
I wondered if any experts might have some ideas on how we could customize ERPNext to fit this need.
I was really hoping someone else would reply to this because I’m in basically the same situation. As far as I can tell, there isn’t really a good built-in way to do this.
The route we are trying to take is a custom script that will run a get on serials for the current customer, and then insert that stuff into a table in an HTML field on the customer page.
We were thinking of adding a “Parent Assembly” field to the serial number doctype’s, which essentially makes them hierarchical. So then if you navigate to an assembly you could see all the children parts which are a part of that assembly. Complicating factor are parts which aren’t serialized though are an exception, as well as lots. For us getting started by just having parts that are individually serialized able to be tracked this way would at least be a good start, since only our “major assemblies” are individually serialized.
Another approach would be (or maybe in addition) to have as “as built BOM” for each serialized assembly which is like a normal BOM but reflects the true configuration. These BOMs could then be tagged specially so they aren’t visible through the normal interface. The assemblies could then have a “Target BOM” which would reflect the intended configuration, and allow the user to see the comparison between the as built and target BOM easily.
