We are a small electronics manufucturer in Australia.
We run an SMT line and produce lowish quantities of highish value items.
We currently use Inventree for inventory managament and a mix of spreadsheets and miscelaneous for everything else.
I’ve been evaluating Tryton as a replacement for all the above. I’ve messed about in the online demo and set up a couple of test servers here in the lab.
It looks to me like Tryton will do most of what we need out of the box. This is great! I’m also willing to change our processes to match Tryton where applicable. We are small enough (3 people) that this should not be too painful).
To start off with, I’d like Tryton to manage:
Parts inventory (Inventree does this for me currently)
Parts purchasing (Inventree does this for me currently)
BOM management (Inventree does this for me currently)
Production (This is currently spreadsheets and text files - yuck)
Managing contacting of customers (Spreadsheet)
Timesheets (No real solution here…)
We will keep our current accounting system for the moment at our accountants suggestion.
I’ve evaluated workflows for almost all of the above things and it is looking positive. Tryton is able to do pretty much everything, with maybe a bit of change in our process.
I’m posting as I have some unanswered questions that maybe I can get some assistance with. They might be a bit basic…
We tend to manufacture in short bursts (eg once a month), but make multiple different item within that short burst. EG, at the start of April we might make 50 of items A, B and C. These all share a bunch of common parts across them. When we go to manufacture, my current workflow is to look at what we will make, do some clunky stuff with Inventree and a spreadsheet, then get a list of the parts that we need to buy, then generate purchase orders in Inventree. This is very painful. Can Tryton save us here? Can anyone offer some advice on a workflow we can adopt?
In my current inventory management system I can go to an item that is producable and very quickly find out how many of that item I can make with the inventory I have on hand. Is Tryton able to do this? I haven’t managed to find this.
We currently store serial numbers of manufactured devices in CSV. It is just a python script that grabs the serial when the unit is tested. It would be nice to bring this data into Tryton - we could the properly associate the device with the customer it is going to.
I can offer some input here. We are also manufacturing products that get a unique serial number each. To track which customer has which serial number, we first create a stock location for each customer (by default when creating a new party, Tryton uses a general “all purpose” customer location). Then, we track the serial numbers by lots, utilizing the great GitHub - NaN-tic/trytond-stock_serial_number module. It specifies that in the field serial_number, users can indicate whether a product requires a serial number. If this option is activated, the serial number must be provided through the lot, and only movements with a quantity of 1.0 will be permitted. Then, we use the function “lots by locations” to generate a list of all products and the customer locations, to see where each product is located.
You may be interested in contacting @vincent which is also in Australia
With such needs you should start with: stock, purchase, production, sale and timesheetmodules.
If you want tryton to compute the purchases and production needs based on demand, you should probalby look at stock_supply (and stock_supply_production) modules.
Yes, you will need stock_supply modules there. With such modules tryton will compute what is need to be purchased on supplier based on your production planning. To make it work, it is very important that you set production planned dates otherwise tryton will not consider the demand into the needs. Tryton uses “Forecast Quantity” to determine what needs to be purchased, when it detects the forecast is negative a Purchase Request is created.
Yes, there is a relate in the product to show the Locations quantities. Here is the documentation where everything is explained:
In such case you should consider using stock_lot_unit module. In tryton we create a lot number for each serial. In order to make everything work as expected I will consider making the lot required for the product and setting a minimal unit. This way tryton will ensure no serial number is duplicated and that no stock move is created without serial number.
We do not have a forecast of producible products.
It may be a little bit complex because we support multiple BoMs per product which may result in different forecast. So such forecast should probably be computed for each BoM but also for each BoMs input of the BoM and so on.
Thanks for this - I think this is just what I need. With stock_supply_production It looks like I can set lower stock limits that will trigger a production run.
I’ll have to evaluate a work flow with what you recommend, re production planned dates etc.
I didn’t have much luck with this. I set up a producible product and gave it a BOM, etc . Using the relate from the product I can see “Stock quantities by Warehouse”, but this shows me that there are none of that product in stock. I can’t see how many I can make from the parts available. I’ll have to continue to experiment.
Ah, I see further down:
Are you suggesting that it may be possible to forecast producible products?
Thanks for the advice re storing the serial. I’ll experiment with that also. In the mean time I must sort the first two issue out.
Ok, thanks. Would it be possible with stock Tryton? If so, can you point me to any links/documentation? Or would some additional modules/programming be required?
