jonesde
commented
7 years ago In general HiveMind doesn't get into physical assets (materials, sub-assemblies, finished goods, etc) and yes it's use of the WorkEffort entity is focused on services and even more specifically on coordinating multi-phase projects with larger numbers of tasks (as opposed to large numbers of independent one-off/ad-hoc tasks). Most of the screens/logic/etc for service projects and tasks are not all that helpful for manufacturing and production.
PopCommerce is closer to this with the inventory (general Asset) management logic and screens.
There is some functionality in mantle-usl for manufacturing because it is used in a commercial application designed for large scale but simple manufacturing, ie single-level BoM and single step production (no routes). In the industry where it is currently used if they have multiple steps they do separate runs with interim inventory produced, stored, and consumed by other runs.
How to target and structure the open source applications is another question. POP Commerce doesn't currently have anything for production runs, even simple ones, but the industry it targets often include companies that do their own production (ie wholesalers who are not pure distributors often manufacture their own product, or outsource the manufacture of their product which they sometimes want to track too).
For the purposes of application design I don't think the 3 sectors in that wikipedia article are all that helpful. Even in the service sector things like medical services are WAY different from custom software development services and have very different software needs.
Even the manufacturing field is pretty diverse, do you have a specific sort of manufacturing in mind? If it fits in with goods production that also needs inventory management, purchasing, sales, etc then PopCommerce would be a good place to put it. I've been planning on adding something like that sooner or later, but have other priorities on contracts right now.
Some of this may come up on a contract for me sooner than later as one client who is using PopCommerce in production right now does outsourced manufacturing but wants to move toward purchasing raw materials themselves and using simple production run tracking to monitor materials consumed (issued from inventory, sent to contract manufacturers) and product produced (received into inventory) along with tracking cost of materials and of the manufacturing service to calculate their cost of the goods produced. Right now they are using purchase orders for these (and shipments for inventory management) and adjusting the Asset.acquireCost based on their calculation of actual cost in addition to what the contract manufacturer charges per unit.
ccarlow
igorgallingani
magware
Manufacturing/Production Management or JobShop functionality seems only partially supported in ManufacturingServices so I've been working on filling in the gaps for personal needs. HiveMind's description indicates that it is designed for Service industries and is geared more toward project management rather than production.
To avoid "muddying" HiveMind, does it make more sense to have manufacturing management handled with a separate component (something called JobShop or, to distinguish from Ofbiz and have a cool name like HiveMind, something like MakerShop)?
This article https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tertiary_sector_of_the_economy suggests that HiveMind is designed to support the third sector of the economy. So a JobShop/MakerShop component would be designed to support the second sector (manufacturing raw materials to finished products). I'm not sure if the first sector of the economy would require its own component because I don't have much experience with it but I vaguely remember a discussion years back about how agriculture couldn't be handled very easily in OFBiz or at least not OOTB so perhaps a separate component would have helped.
I'm really just looking for guidance on how to go about providing manufacturing capabilities in Moqui. I'm open to any suggestions.