We often find ourselves spending a lot of time working in contacts, leads and opportunities. Some or all of these modules are often used in a wide range of businesses. Small and large businesses alike often harness the marketing power that Vtiger allows you to structure and develop.
One of the large segments of businesses that takes this to the next level is eCommerce stores. Sure, websites that retail products will likely want to track their leads, convert to contacts and create opportunities for their teams. However, the root of an eCommerce business is in their product database. The traditional online store either resells products or manufacturers their own. One of our recent customizations was to assist a company that manufacturers electrical wire. Since we’ve had a number of similar requests, I thought I would talk about our most recent one.
Our client sells smaller samples of their primary product. They use a process where they take a large spool of wire and “cut” it down into many products that can then be sold to their customers. A very important step of this process is to track the finished product to it’s source or parent product. In this case it’s to ensure product quality and to meet certain standards within their industry. For other clients where we’ve completed a similar product enhancement it’s been important to track product aging. A product lot tracking system can be much more advanced than just tracking the Lot Number.
If the product and product lot should be tracked at the individual product level then using a field in conjunction with updates and history might be sufficient. It’s more complex if there is a parent product and child product (as in the case of the wire retailer). If you create products from an original product lot then the best way to proceed is to use a separate custom module. Doing it this way affords greater control over the sub products and any orders they may appear on.
This is just a short summary of some of the requests we have worked on in the past. If you would like to specifically review any of these concepts first hand please feel free to add a comment or email us directly.
